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SHACKLED YOUTH 

Comments on Schools, School 

People, and Other 

People 

By 
EDWARD YEOMANS 



And he looked , and, behold , the bush burned with fire 
and the bush was not consumed. — Exodus hi, i. 




THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 
BOSTON 



V.t)\^^^ 



y *> 



Copyright, 192 1 
By Edward Yeomans 



m 10 1921 
.S)CI,A614380 



CONTENTS 

I. A Point of View on Schools in General . i 

II. Geography 13 

III. A Teacher of History ...... 26 

IV. The School Shop 47 

V. Music 63 

VI. Literature in the Grades 77 

VII. Natural History . 99 

VIII. Astronomy no 

IX. Recreation . 116 

X. Cross-Fertilization 130 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/shackledyouthcomOOyeom 



SHACKLED YOUTH 



A POINT OF VIEW ON SCHOOLS IN GENERAL 

In the face of the oceanic inertia of school-adminis- 
tration and of the general oily calm that pervades it, 
— except for local disturbances here and there and a 
certain ground-swell as a result, — it is something 
**insectian" to comment on it with any hope of 
making even a very obscure splash anywhere. And 
your splash may, even if it is a big one, simply an- 
nounce that you have fallen in and sunk. The bot- 
tom of this sea of school-consciousness is covered with 
the remains of school commentators and critics. They 
form the ooze, and nothing but volcanic disturb- 
ances will ever bring them to any light again. 

But, still, — to keep to this insect idea, — a man 
who wants to write about it can do so for his own 
pleasure, can he not? If you have ever lain sleepily 
under a hedge on a golden October afternoon, you 
may have seen one of the exquisite dissipations of the 
aged and contemplative spider. With what silk he has 
spared from the daily net, he ascends a grass-stem and 
looks abroad over the earth with a sense of holiday. 
He will spin no more nets; this may be his last day, 
or near it. He is very thin, having often, like the apos- 
tle, toiled all night and caught nothing in the frosty 
morning. 



2 SHACKLED YOUTH 

With a profound wisdom, confined almost exclusively 
to himself, he spins silk threads into the air; and when 
he gets the wind pulling on his balloon and lifting him 
sufficiently, he lets go, perhaps with a shout of joy, 
and sails over the purple-and-gold continent. A man 
who writes about schools is sailing over the great quies- 
cent bulk of the subject on some threads of thought 
he has spun, and enjoys the adventure. 

His threads pull him up, but do not pull the schools 
up. To pull schools up, you have to get under them. 
You have to get down into the mud and muck of poli- 
tics, — ward politics, — and the cloying and disheart- 
ening entanglements — the tentacles — of religious 
prejudices and propaganda and the policies of labor 
and capital. You have to get down, and with what- 
ever leverage you can command, and with such com- 
panionship as you can inspire or secure, heave prodig- 
iously at the structure overhead, to move it forward 
a microscopic little on a very imperceptible upward 
incline. Because the whole gravitation of society is 
against its going forward the least bit faster than 
society itself is going. Instead of the schools in gen- 
eral being the sources of social irrigation and refresh- 
ment, they have remained more or less fruitless in 
their respective communities ; very interesting to look 
at, because filled with such wonderful potential, such 
gorgeous opportunity, but unfertilized and fruitless. 

There are leaves, and much noise of leaves, but the 
leaves of the school tree are not for the healing of the 
nation. Why not? What is this sterilization, this 
deadly fungus, which attacks this plant and prevents 



SCHOOLS IN GENERAL 3 

it from pouring out young men and women of such 
incandescence of soul and intelligence of mind and 
heart that two generations would purify the earth? 

First, the state of society — the "folkways" — out- 
side the school. Second, the kind of men intrusted 
with the conduct of schools. 

The state of society outside the school is not the 
subject of this preface. It could be shown, by cross- 
sections taken at different levels, that much of it was 
still immersed in neolithic thought so far as its inmost 
reactions were concerned, and that some of it was 
simian. Comparatively little of it has got rid of a 
mental tail, though it has learned to conceal it rather 
adroitly. You come upon it unawares, now and again, 
and, looking curiously behind, have a chance to see 
that prehensile atrocity engaged in wagging the very 
mind you are dealing with — a mind sometimes dis- 
guised by a face and a habit disconcertingly attractive. 

But this is not a department of society that takes 
any interest in schools, except that casual interest of 
the parent looking on at his children's antics without 
the least comprehension that there may be any des- 
tiny for them beyond a repetition of the parental life, 
if possible in a more luxurious flat. 

What the proportion of discriminating and intelli- 
gent people is, who knows? And these do not think 
alike; for they are divided by a great gulf with the 
slenderest of bridges over it: on one side, the people 
whose mental structure is mechanical, the practical 
people, the lovers of efficiency, the tough-minded 
people, the exploiters of men since all eternity ; on the 



4 SHACKLED YOUTH 

other, the emotional, the poetic, the artistic, the lovers 
of beauty, and the distributers of a peculiar happiness. 

The latter is not a populous group, and is fringed 
about with ignorance and sentimentality and pose, 
so that the wheat must be winnowed out by the winds 
of trial. But who will say that it is not out of this 
group, out of the wheat in this group, that teachers 
of children should be chosen? Yet it is a most uncom- 
mon occurrence. As a matter of fact the superintend- 
ents of schools — the men who must give the color to 
the school, as a whole — are chosen almost exclusively 
from the other group, the predominant group, by 
Boards of Education who belong wholly to it. School- 
administration has become a branch of technical train- 
ing, and it is perfectly amazing to see the deadly com- 
placency with which the school administrator goes 
about his task, and accepts responsibilities of whose 
real nature he knows nothing, and which cannot even 
be explained to him because he has no faculties with 
which to cognize these imponderable things. He either 
expires in this atmosphere, or ploughs through such 
amounts of it as may stand across his way, with the 
expression of a man holding his breath. 

What he is enthusiastic about just now are educa- 
tional tests, with charts and percentages; but he has 
always been trying to make a school into a factory. 
His instinct is the instinct of the captain of industry. 
And he flourishes mightily in the school soil and puts 
down prodigious roots throughout the sub-soil of the 
community, and wraps them around anything that 
will assist the anchorage, until the process of pulling 



SCHOOLS IN GENERAL 5 

him up is likely to devastate the surrounding country. 
Nevertheless, — if you can, — and if you can supplant 
him with a man from the other group, from the less 
mechanical group, — do it, in God's name. But why? 
Does n't the standardized efficiency-educator with his 
genius for programme, for surveys, for tests, meet the 
requirements of society? He does. The next question 
is the crucial one : are you satisfied with society as you 
see it and feel it? Yes? Then no more need be said. 
If you are not satisfied, perhaps you might agree that 
the reason is that the happiness of childhood does not 
sufficiently carry over into adult life. Perhaps you 
might admit that adult society seems to lack any scent 
for the trails that lead to light-heartedness and free- 
dom. And if you will go as far as that, you may be 
ready to consent to having children, at any rate, 
poured into the muddy stream of contemporaneous 
life, with some slight hope that their contribution will 
diminish the turbidity, so that all of us may see better 
and see further than we do. 

Of course, the work of the world has to be done, and 
it has to be done well. The school standard of crafts- 
manship must be kept high, for the world's professional 
standard is high. Things must be not only done well 
in school, but done very well. There is no room for 
sloppiness and tag-ends. But that does not involve 
afiy lockstep, or cast any shadows of the prison-house 
around the growing boy. There is no happiness in 
anything except a high standard, because there is no 
happiness in stupidity and awkwardness, but only 
humiliation and chagrin. 



6 SHACKLED YOUTH 

Therefore, we dare to say, having floated so far on 
our cobweb, that there is only one kind of person really 
eligible as an administrator or teacher of a school — 
namely, an artist; for is not teaching an art? The 
truth of every subject taught is the Emotion and the 
Music at the centre of it; and the fact about life is that 
we miss it all if we miss the joy. And that joy must 
be of the inward sort, which depends only on its whole- 
some and well-poised soul and body. And, also, it can 
safely be stated that fifty per cent of the cultivatable 
area of children's minds is not touched at all, but goes 
to complete waste — like a rainless land. 

The sun rises day after day on these adult deserts, 
these mental sterilities, these dried-up clay-fields, which 
might have been irrigated and be supporting forests — 
forests of happiness and expression and beneficent 
activity. Instead, there are oases, spots, where per- 
haps certain things - — certain very useful and desira- 
ble things — are brought to a very high state of culti- 
vation. In these groves the man's spirit wanders ; and 
unless it happens to be a very large and spacious sub- 
ject that has engaged his interest, he eventually be- 
comes a very much confined person. It is a very small 
number of people, comparatively, who cultivate a 
large place, a place which approaches in any degree 
the confines, the limits, of their possibilities. 

We leave them out of account here. We leave out 
of account, also, all people of any degree of genius or 
of unusually strong predilection ; those people will take 
care of themselves. 

It is a bit hard to admit that your child is an average 



SCHOOLS IN GENERAL 7 

child ; but ninety- five per cent of all children are aver- 
age, and always will be, and we have these in mind 
now. But average children have all kinds of hidden 
potentialities. Most of even the basic ones, the most 
obvious ones, are never more than touched by that 
sunlight and rain in response to which they would de- 
velop leaf and branch, and the fruit thereof might 
shake like Lebanon. But no ; the sun of special inter- 
est in their individual fortunes goes down ; the routine 
of life, the common lot, the common everything, follows. 

Are they stimulated in school to continue their in- 
tellectual interests, and to walk on higher and higher 
levels, among the masters of literature and art and 
science? Not at all! 

We have got to cultivate deeper, and to cultivate a 
larger area. In order to accomplish the deeper culti- 
vation, the deep ploughing and ventilation of that 
soil, you have to work with, and not against, the grain 
and gravitation of the individual. You determine 
what his enthusiasms are, and you make these yours. 
There is too often a breach, a gap — a broken cir- 
cuit — between the teacher's enthusiasms and the 
pupil's. The teacher is not a teacher at all until the 
circuit is complete. 

Are you qualified to teach? Then you must have 
vicarious interests, and you can't get them up for the 
occasion; you can't produce any imitation that will 
pass even a casual inspection. You have to come out 
of a place where not only the obvious realities, but 
also the mysteries and miracles and pageants and 
poetry of Things, of Days and of Nights, of People 



X 



8 SHACKLED YOUTH 

and of Events, of Water and Land, and every living 
thing and every dead thing, have been looming like 
mountains or nodding like flowers along your path. 
And into this path you invite your pupil. 

The centre of any subject, the place in which it 
shuts up its sweetness and its aroma, the place which 
contains all its significance, can never be reached ex- 
cept by an artist. The truth about that subject is the 
beauty at the heart of it, and the music and the radiant 
passion it actually contains. In other words, Emotion, 
And you of the cold eye and colorless habit of life — 
shall you attempt this mission? Shall you, for a living, 
take the hands of class after class of little children, 
and lead them into places clammy with routine and 
barred with efliciency tests, and stale with the taints 
of modern industrial competition and the conventions 
of the social ritual? 

The test of wisdom is not found in the schools, says 
Walt, and never will be. But schools ought to start or 
stimulate a process that will grow into wisdom outside, 
or into understanding, which, with all our getting, we 
most need to get; or, at least, into a healthy curiosity 
for, and sympathy with, the things of the mind and 
the things of the imagination, past, present, and future. 
The teacher is he who, passing through the scholastic 
Valley of Mara, makes it a well. 

Such attack as there is on conformity in these pages 
refers to the complacent conformity that exudes from 
those people who are quite sure in their hearts, though 
unwilling to confess it, that the Way, the Truth and 
the Life are along a road that leads to recognition — 



SCHOOLS IN GENERAL 9 

to recognition in business, in profession, in society. 
Without recognition, what is there to live for? 

My thesis is for the unrecognized as well as for the 
recognized; and so far as schools are concerned, I assert 
that they must so arrange their affairs that all their 
children are sent out, in the words of the old Latin 
inscription, Utrumque paratus — prepared for either 
event. 

Prepared to take success and distinction with the 
simplicity and grace and equanimity of man or 
woman who knows that the issues of life are not in 
these things. 

Prepared, on the other hand, to take obscurity with- 
out resentment or envy, because, as they have sought 
first a certain Kingdom of Heaven, all things are added. 

Now what is meant by that? Is n't that one of those 
antiquated platitudes designed to keep people con- 
tented in inferior positions while life overhead goes 
by in a race? 

It is hard to define what is meant by that; but per- 
haps some meaning may appear in the articles follow- 
ing. To the writer it means the place on the other side 
of the eye of the needle. It means the place where 
everything really beautiful and interesting happens, 
and to which only those who retain the best qualities 
of childhood can possibly gain admission. 

Certainly we cannot tolerate any kind of culture 
that produces the intellectual cynic, or the Philistine, 
with their private sneers for all efforts to introduce 
good- will into human affairs. 

And neither do we want the bitter "class " person — 



10 SHACKLED YOUTH 

the disappointed, rat-eyed individual, creeping along 
the walls and through the drains of the social system, 
dragging his class-consciousness about with him like 
the dead albatross on the neck of the Ancient Mariner 
— an albatross that should have been buried long ago. 

The war has changed the world much more than we 
realize now, and has shown the need of change — of a 
progressive change — hereafter. And the need it has 
shown is the need of the privates in the ranks of 
humanity for a fuller life, and the need of the officers 
for a more chastened life, and a more intelligent one 
for both. 

Moreover, the industrial world is awakening to the 
fact that its work is deadening — that it constitutes 
a social hardship and a social injustice because there 
's^ is too much of it. And it is absolutely right. So we 

have left the twelve-hour day behind, and have arrived 
at the eight-hour day, and may arrive at the six-hour 
day. 

But what will people in a six-hour day do with their 
leisure, with the four or more hours when they are not 
too tired to play at something or work at something 
else? For certainly those hours must be employed, 
and not at amusement parks or moving-picture shows, 
or walking streets, or gossiping, or looking for trouble 
along sex lines. What is the responsibility of schools 
in educating children in the employment of their free 
time? 

At a conference of people engaged with the problems 
of vocational training, much was said about patriot- 
ism and American citizenship (perfectly terrible stuff, it 



SCHOOLS IN GENERAL ii 

was !) ; and something was said about character being 
a by-product of work; but nothing was said about its 
being also a by-product of play ; and yet it is as much 
one as the other. If play is not constructive, it is very 
likely to spoil that fine by-product of character you 
expect to get from work. 

Normally, the education of the individual never 
stops, and schools have to arrange so that the minds of 
the pupils stay open, and therefore fertilizable. It is the 
one test -of their job. Otherwise sterility follows. 

As a matter of plain fact, the people who ought to 
be teaching are usually not teaching, and too many of 
the people who are teaching have no right to teach. 
They would have more right to teach if they had not 
taught so much. The life of a teacher may easily dis- 
qualify him to teach. And that is, perhaps, the worst 
evil of our public-school system. It lacks ventilation, 
it smells badly of routine, and a poor grade of profes- 
sionalism, and immaturity, and arrested development. 

Let us arise and go, now, and find teachers! And 
yet, let no one feel that this writer has not a profound 
sympathy for teachers ; for the teachers who have the 
actual job to do to-morrow and the day after; who 
have to take my children and your children, with all 
their curious habits and obstinacies, — with a lot of 
their fine natural instincts spoiled by a shallow, pre- 
tentious, meaningless, or perhaps unhappy home-life; 
by moving pictures and the Sunday supplement; by 
too much money and by too little money, — and make 
some kind of a show with them against perfectly hope- 
less odds. 



12 SHACKLED YOUTH 

Indeed, theirs is a daily process of baling with a 
sieve, and they drown by thousands at the task. 

But now do these teachers ask themselves such ques- 
tions as these : — 

Do you think the present kind of school is worth 
keeping afloat, and have you any idea that it is on 
the way to a desirable place? 

Don't you think, on the whole, that all you are do- 
ing is to keep the pot boiling, and that out of that 
pot comes a very bad smell, — the smell of business 
competition and political corruption and religious pre- 
judice and national arrogance and personal selfishness, 
— and very little that is nutritive combined with a 
great quantity that is poisonous? 

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the emphasis 
is on the wrong things at school, and that you are as- 
sisting in doing more harm than good? 

If you read the following articles at all, will you read 
them with an open mind, and with the feeling that 
the writer is one of many who stand outside the school 
world, and who, from their own contacts with men and 
events, with their own children and other children, 
look in upon schools with a perennial sadness because 
they evidently are not functioning in such a way as to 
justify any more hope for increased happiness, for 
Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men, than the pres- 
ent state of society, the level in each being the same? 
Whereas, raising the school -level is the one best way 
by which to raise the general level. la other words, 
the schools are ''hollow, like a cup; in every hole the 
sea comes up, till it can come no more." 



II 

GEOGRAPHY 

The geography teacher is a girl of twenty-five or so, 
who touches up her face a little with paint and pow- 
der, wears the light-topped and high-heeled shoes and 
the short skirts of the ''shop lady" and her customer, 
and is teaching until some male picks her off the tree 
of the knowledge of good and evil as a ripe and de- 
sirable apple, thinking that the Garden of Eden goes 
with it. 

She chose geography because she might just as well 
teach that as anything, and she seemed particularly 
good at remembering the boundaries of things and the 
principal rivers. She cares considerably less for geog- 
raphy, per se, than she does for a book of Hall Caine's. 
Its importance consists in the fact that you can make 
a living — $850 or $1000 a year — by teaching it to 
children. By the use of a book written by a man who 
was also interested in writing about geography as a 
means of making money, and by the further use of 
maps and globes manufactured by people who care no 
more for geography than the people who make stoves 
or hats, she can "put over" a certain process called 
"teaching geography," and get enough to pay room 
and board and allow something for her real interests 
besides; until, as stated, a stray man, looking into the 
little inclosure where she lives, has a queer feeling that 
this geography teacher is a rare and priceless thing to 
possess. 



14 SHACKLED YOUTH 

And so indeed she may be — but not as a geography 
teacher. As a fiancee and as a wife and mother, per- 
haps, her real life begins, and her life as a thinker 
about geography probably stops absolutely, and the 
last thing that you can catch that girl doing is giving 
a single thought to geography thereafter. That is per- 
fectly right. At last, she is honest. 

But why should a person ever have been selected to 
teach children, to whom geography was nothing ex- 
cept so many dollars a month, and to whom children's 
aching minds were nothing except receptacles into 
which you could stuff a few maps and a few names — 
so that they might answer the necessary questions and 
move on to the next grade? 

Here is the class : thirty children — say, ten years 
old. They are like maple trees in April, all shivering 
with pistillate flowers to catch pollen, thirsty for the 
words that shall fertilize. 

The geography teacher has a map on the wall. When 
the map is there, the children are asked questions like 
this: ''What are the main exports of the State of 
Massachusetts?" When the map is not there, the 
children are asked to bound the various states — to 
give the names of the capitals. 

Even when they draw maps, — a most delicious 
diversion, — they get no sense of what they are about: 
that they are engaged in a most astonishing adventure 
of walking or riding or sailing with the people who first 
laid out the lines of those bays and islands and prom- 
ontories, startling the beaver, or the walrus, or the 
moose, or the lion or giraffe. 



GEOGRAPHY 15 

It is one thing to draw the lines that inclose Hud- 
son's Bay, for instance. It is another thing to think, 
while you draw those lines, or while you look at Hud- 
son's Bay on the map, of old Captain Hendrik Hudson, 
sailing about up there in that most inhospitable and 
lonely place, making the map. And also that Hudson's 
Bay is there now, exactly as it was, and that you 
certainly must see it and not be satisfied with a map 
of it. All around it are little camps, very far apart and 
extremely quiet camps, where, in the deep snow, the 
Indian trapper goes softly about his ancient business, 
and lives comfortably all winter where you would die 
in one week. But you could train yourself to live like 
that Indian. And that 's one thing you hope you will 
not forget to do when you grow up — make a close 
friend of one of those Indians, and have him teach you 
geography — the geography of Hudson's Bay. For he 
knows it, oh, how he knows it! And yet it never oc- / 
curs to him to teach it; nobody in school would think 
of bringing an Indian to teach children the geography 
of the place where he lives, — or a trapper, or a 
French- Canadian, a voyageur, — even though you 
could get him for less than you pay the young lady, 
who cares much more for a well-furnished little 
apartment on Belden Avenue than for any nasty cold 
place up North or dirty hot place down South. 

One time something incredible happened. A man 
from up that way, from Alaska, — a mail- carrier, — 
did actually give a lesson in geography to a room full 
of children. And in order to do it properly, what did 
he have to have — maps and books? Dear Lord, no! 



i6 SHACKLED YOUTH 

he had twelve or so Eskimo dogs, and he had one 
dog in particular that he wanted particularly to talk 
about, a dog that was really a great gray wolf. That 
dog understood the geography of Alaska even better 
than his master did; and that dog and his master to- 
gether so impressed the geography of Alaska on those 
children that their souls and bodies trembled and shook 
with the power of that experience; and thereafter, to 
their dying day, that lesson in geography was at least 
one perfectly real and ecstatic piece of life. 

It would be something of the same thing if you could 
get the geography of the Malay Archipelago, for in- 
stance, taught by some native friend of Mr. Conrad's; 
if you could get Sven Hedin or Ekai Kawagouchi to 
pick a man from Thibet to teach the children about 
the Himalayas. But no — they must be taught by 
someone who prefers the security of a flat to the rig- 
ors of climate on the open surface of the earth under 
the windy sky. 

The superintendent picks out the geography teacher. 
The superintendent ventures only to the golf field, and 
his wife ventures to the musicale at the woman's club, 
and they both venture to a hotel at Holland, Michigan, 
for a few weeks in rocking-chairs there, taking pains 
to avoid sunburn and anything violent. 

But I met a geography teacher once — a professional 
too: not an Indian, but a Norwegian. In point of fact, 
I have met several geography teachers, but only one — 
this one — was a professional. The others were men 
who dropped in from the ends of the earth, who sat 
for a while at the table, or by the fire, sometimes on 



GEOGRAPHY 17 

the floor, smoking and talking to the family about 
geography. 

One used to talk about the Rocky Mountains and 
Arizona — about the Rocky Mountain sheep and the 
Moki and Zuni Indians. And as he talked, he modeled 
the Rocky Mountains with his big hands, and painted 
the great walls of ochre rock; and there, on that sharp 
profile on the remotest ledge — look! — do you recog- 
nize that silhouette, that perfect thing? — the wild 
sheep! And one time, sitting under a precipice of a 
hundred feet, over his head poured an avalanche of 
wild sheep, landing like thistledown, without a scram- 
ble or a slip and poured down the valley like a turbid 
stream. And then the buffalo of the prairie, the cou- 
gars and grizzly bears, the Indians of the Mesas and 
of the Pueblos. The great desert, the shadowy coyote, 
the naked Indian runner, with a red scarf about his 
black hair, appearing on one burning horizon, crossing 
your trail without a glance, disappearing over the other 
horizon in silence and beauty. 

Another was a man who casually walked across 
Turkestan, Afghanistan, and some part of Mongolia 
and China. He knew how people live in the huge 
vacant spaces on the roof of the world, where the wind 
is incessant and terrific, and the sand blows like a tor- 
ment of hell, and the shepherds move from place to 
place, following the scanty water and grass in their 
red-skin tents, and receive you with all the grace and 
dignity and courtliness of the great traditions of an 
ancient race. 

You get some impression from both these teachers 



i8 SHACKLED YOUTH 

of geography that we people of the trolley-car and the 
department store and cheap theatre are certainly no 
ornament to the earth or to the race of men. Rather, 
we are an abominable blemish; and against the poise 
and grace and courtesy and graciousness of these bar- 
barians, our own bodily characteristics and a consid- 
erable part of our mental characteristics are as dust 
and ashes. 

That is their experience. They have met both kinds. 

Then there was a man the other day, — just yester- 
day, — who stretched himself out in a chair, blew 
smoke up to the ceiling, and in the presence of my two 
boys, who were congealed into stone images, who for- 
got to breathe, told a simple tale of the cocoanut busi- 
ness in the Malay Peninsula. 

It appears he was invited to go into the cocoanut 
business, being engaged at the time in drifting through 
the opalescent mysteries and terrors of the Malay 
Archipelago. A big Dutchman made it seem most 
alluring to plant twenty thousand trees, wait ten years, 
and then make, every year thereafter, a dollar a tree 
from copra. 

So he went down to look over the location where he 
was invited to spend the remainder of his life. It was 
a beautiful place beside those enigmatic seas — beau- 
tiful with that poisonous beauty, that serpentine, re- 
morseless beauty, that we know so well from Joseph 
Conrad. And he was disposed to go in with the 
big Dutchman until somebody whispered the word 
"Tigers." He listened to that word and made a few 
inquiries. It appeared that the tigers in the cocoanut 



GEOGRAPHY 19 

orchard were about as usual as the hornets in a peach 
orchard. Of course, if you could afford it, you rode on 
an elephant — notice the boys — and thereby avoided 
some risk. But, on the whole, the daily presence of 
that brightly burning beast — who could never be 
detected until it was a case of being a dead shot or 
being dead — made the cocoanut business seem less 
desirable than the lemon business in San Domingo, 
which now engages a part of his attention. What 
would the Malay Peninsula ever mean to those two 
boys if they got the news out of geographies and pro- 
fessional geography teachers? 

But this professional I mentioned is a Norwegian. 
I suppose, because I know one real teacher of geog- 
raphy who is also a professional, that there must be 
others in the profession ; for it is not all at likely that 
I know the only one. But this is certain — their value 
has never been realized. 

This man walks the crust of the earth with adoration, 
as old John Muir used to walk it. And in the confine- 
ment of a city flat and a city school, with the crashing 
debasements of noise and the defilements of dirt and 
smoke, his spirit sweeps like eagles over all the moun- 
tains or wades with the heron in all the rivers of the 
world. 

He made some maps of his own. How did they dif- 
fer from other maps? They were so beautiful that as 
mural decorations they could not be excelled. Some 
indication of the mural value of a map may be seen 
in the Pennsylvania Terminal of New York City. And 
of course these maps had not a single name on them. 



20 SHACKLED YOUTH 

A beautiful map is defiled by names; and yet it is the 
names only that make a map intelligible to the stand- 
ard geography teacher, or to her superiors. 

This Norwegian seems to think that the earth is 
not composed of cities and towns and railroad routes. 
It is a very strange, wild, and romantic place to live 
in, still. 

"Land and sea have, with the help of the sun, bred 
a curious fungoid thing that creeps over it. But that 
did not exhaust land and sea. 

"They are yet young and sing at their work; and if 
you want to get a sense of how young and how vital 
and how generous and honest and relentless and terri- 
ble these giants of Jotunheim are, clear out of this! 
If you must be an insect, — a fly, — do not choose to 
be a house-fly about apartment houses, ofhce-build- 
ings, theatres, clubs: be at least a dragon-fly." 

Then the wistfulness of those faces of regimented 
boys and girls sitting before him, caught in the nets of 
circumstance, prompts him to say: "But, my dear 
children, if you come to love the land, the sea, the 
rivers, the sky ; if you come to love geography through 
thinking about geography, then you may be sure you 
will one day experience geography! And if you don't, 
then the door into geography is locked against you for- 
ever. There are those resounding words, 'Unto him 
that knocketh, it shall be opened.' All we can do in 
this class is to knock at the geography door lightly, 
timidly, perhaps, at first, but more and more resolutely ; 
and before you know it, the door flies open — and then 
you find yourself, as I have found myself so many 



GEOGRAPHY 21 

times, drifting along the lovely contours of the Alle- 
ghanies or the Blue Ridge, among dogwood and Judas- 
tree blossoms ; exploring the bays and islands of Puget 
Sound, or the Florida Keys; drinking from glacial 
streams in the Dolomites, or climbing among the pur- 
ple rocks of Norway in the twilight and sleeping in 
a hut against the very stars. And without money and 
without price — that is to say, with so little money 
that you can get enough by saving on the things that 
are totally unimportant compared with this thing. 

"For this seems to me to be Life, and Liberty and 
the Pursuit of Happiness ; and most of the goings and 
comings of men and women, who are old enough to 
know better, seem to me to be Death and Slavery and 
the Pursuit of Misery. 

" I would like to state the whole case for geography, 
but I can't — it is too big. You know how it was with 
Thor when he tried to lift the Utgard snake, or throw 
down the old woman; and Thor was a god. I say, you 
can't even state the case for geography adequately, 
much less scratch the surface of the subject. You can 
do just one thing, you can associate yourself with this 
magnificent thing, first here in this class and after- 
wards outside, and see what it does to you. 

** Geography makes all people what they are, so far 
as their vital habits and customs are concerned. There 
is no good-will about it, and no morality at all; so it 
has been hard to introduce those elements into human 
affairs. All the same, if you want to keep clear of the 
fevers and flaccidity and obesity of human society, 
you will have to get back to geography over and over 



22 SHACKLED YOUTH 

again. And not in parties — far from it: you must go 
alone. The impact of parties, of groups of laughers 
and jokers and witty commenters and preoccupied 
duffers full of law or medicine or anything else, breaks 
all the little wires that carry those currents to the soul 
that David had in mind when he said, "He leadeth 
me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul." 

"And that is why I have written those words on the 
blackboard to-day, at the beginning of our acquaint- 
ance in geography: 'He restoreth my soul.' This is 
from one of the very greatest poems in any literature — 
by a shepherd who naturally expressed geography in 
every thought and word. And if your association with 
geography does not restore your soul, and even lead 
you in the paths of righteousness, then, children, I have 
not taught the subject, and you have not learned it." 

And so the year's work in geography begins. It is 
the work required by the school. But it is all kinds of 
geography together, — it is synthetic geography, — and 
it is informed by this geographer with something of its 
own profound and prodigious character, plus the reac- 
tions of a man who knows that children in schools are 
entitled, by every canon of honesty and fair dealing, to 
intellectual and spiritual bread, not stones. 

Now there is, of course, -a geography of information, 
but it does not become educational until it is trans- 
formed into a geography of inspiration. Most of the 
geography of information with which children are 
stuffed until they can recite it — regurgitate it — is 
forgotten. Naturally, it has to be forgotten. There is 
no use, except the bad use of display, in remembering 



GEOGRAPHY 23 

the boundaries of states, or, in fact, anything very ar- 
bitrary of that sort, which takes the place of strong 
visuaHzations, both of the countries and of the people 
and animals and plants that live and die in them. 

' If you want to teach geography in the best way, you 
take the children to the place you wish to have them 
learn about. The geography book and its expositor 
usually take them to no place that they will remember. 

Moving pictures are most valuable in producing the 
illusion. The Seventh Grade, for instance, can go to 
the Great Barrier and beyond with Lieutenant Scott — 
can see the killer whale's interest in the baby seal, and 
the big sea-lions come up out of a hole in the ice and 
bask sleepily in their shining wet hides in a tempera- 
ture of forty below, while the penguins nod approv- 
ingly nearby. 

Yet what we have to depend on most are collateral 
books written by people who have ''been there" and 
who can state the case adequately, plus a teacher of 
geography who, if he has n't been there in body, has 
been there in spirit, and, in his own Patmos, has been 
transported, and can also write a Book of Revelation, 
if called on to do so. The policy of the open door for 
the spirits of children will be his rule of life. With him 
the child who lives back of the Yards in Chicago, or in 
Avenue B in New York, may escape the prison-house 
whose shades approach so early in life — and into which 
he will certainly go. 

The map of North America hangs here on my wall — 
a map by the Norwegian aforesaid. What should it 
suggest? Do you see the map, or do you see what 



24 SHACKLED YOUTH 

the map stands for? Well, what does it stand for? It 
stands for a very beautiful but a very terrible thing. 

A thousand years to it are but as yesterday, and its 
categorical imperative is, ''Return." Generation after 
generation comes up out of it and goes back into it; 
and, how differently they spend their time! While the 
lady in New York goes to ''Del's" after the opera, 
her sister in the Aleutian Islands is getting up to a 
breakfast of hot walrus blood and blubber. The dog- 
team is struggling across Labrador while folks in Flor- 
ida are bathing in the surf. Silver or muddy rivers are 
moving forever. Steamers and trains poke painfully 
along, like insects in high grass. In little spots, illumi- 
nated by electricity and smudged with smoke, there 
is a rather repulsive swarming of the otherwise invisi- 
ble human being. 

The valley of the Mississippi waves in wheat and 
corn. The Rocky Mountains stand rigid in the gri- 
mace of the last convulsive agony of the crust. The 
Gulf of Mexico holds in its bowl the elixir of life for an 
otherwise dead England and Scandinavia. 

The migratory birds stream north or south, follow- 
ing those mysterious lines established by a million 
years of practice. 

The oceans frame it in cobalt and foam. The clouds, 
the sky, and the stars roof it over with a great majesty, 
and the sun works the chemistry and the consolation 
that make the thing go at all, turns mineral into 
vegetable, and allows the smallest cricket to chirp, and 
man himself to sing, under conditions that are really 
desperate. 



GEOGRAPHY 25 

The whole thing goes whirling on through black and 
frigid space, at an incredible rate. North America 
spins, in all its ponderosity, like a spoke in a flywheel. 
In other words, it is an unspeakable mystery, an 
atrocious contradiction, an extravagant anomaly. And 
will what you have to say about North America con- 
sist of everything that is as dull and wearisome as a 
piece of bookkeeping or the minutes of the last meet- 
ing of the School Board? 



Ill 

A TEACHER OF HISTORY 

In writing on these school affairs I am entirely con- 
scious of certain facts : first, that distinguished ability 
is always rare; second, that the character of the teach- 
ing suggested requires a very special kind of teacher — 
a teacher already endowed with many gifts that have 
been denied to most people, and therefore to most 
teachers. And this also is true — that those who have 
not this endowment can never get it. 

You can graft a good apple on a poor apple tree, 
but you cannot graft a good apple on even a good 
walnut tree or cherry tree. In other words, the species 
cannot be changed. Operations in normal schools or 
teachers' colleges will not change the species to which 
a person belongs. 

And the grave and overshadowing consideration 
about a teacher is whether he or she belongs to the 
teaching species, or is only trying to imitate the habits 
of that species and thereby draw a salary. The rules 
of the teaching game are fairly well made out, and are 
being daily elaborated and extended by pedagogues, 
by psychologists, by medical experts; and all for good 
where the intelligence is sound and disinterested. 

But it will always be true that the imponderable 
influences of individuals of the actual teaching species 
will outweigh any set of rules and definitions and meth- 
ods of teaching. 

What is this supreme symbol that educational estab- 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 27 

lishments like to use on their stationery? It is one 
hand holding a torch and another hand open to receive 
it. If it means anything, it means that something 
illuminative is passing, or can be passed, from one 
human being to another — from teacher to scholar. 
And so it can be. ' * Wisdom cannot be passed from one 
having it to another not having it'*; but this strange 
subtle undercurrent, this wind of the spirit which 
bloweth where it listeth, — which cannot be defined 
or confined or expressed in any formulae, — this whole 
core and substance of the educational process can 
be passed. It can be passed on one condition, and 
only one, namely, that the teacher is actually a source 
of illumination, — not a reflected light, but a light- 
producer ; not a moon but a sun, — and that the scholar 
is capable of catching fire, is combustible, is spiritually 
organic. 

The great thing about a teacher of youth is not at 
all how much he knows of the science of education, 
the laws of learning, the administration of a school, 
or of the particular subject which he teaches. The 
important thing is his personal radiative power as an 
illuminant along the highways which his pupils have 
to travel. One could weep, one must weep, to observe 
how, in place of this, something manufactured is sub- 
stituted. 

Did you ever read about the teacher in Nexo*s 
"Pelle the Conqueror"? Read it, and reflect on what 
constitutes the thing we call education. Where shall 
children get their Light — not their knowledge of 
arithmetic and spelling, but their Light? 



28 SHACKLED YOUTH 

Well, you say, why not at home or at church? Are 
not schools designed for the particular purpose of 
doing the thing the home and the Church cannot do 
as well, if at all; namely, teach certain definite topics, 
and end there? That is what they were designed to 
do; but it is plain as can be that if they don't conserve 
all the by-products from the teaching of the subjects 
intrusted to them, and also add things that used to 
be entirely domestic or ecclesiastic, children as a whole 
are not going to be fit for anything except the paths 
of life beaten hard and sterile by prejudice, compla- 
cency, and inarticulate or bellowing ignorance. 

It is not to be supposed that children will be equally 
sensitive to the stimuli that this ideal teacher provides. 
Are not commonplace teachers, therefore, good enough 
for commonplace children? Is not society composed 
almost entirely of ordinary humdrum people, from all 
eternity predestined to be so : to be possessed of rather 
bad taste, of pretension, showiness, shallowness, and 
a blissful, mischievous, or malevolent ignorance? 

No doubt about it, at all. But who can tell how 
much this huge percentage could be reduced if, at a 
certain early period in their lives, people went through 
a better process of screening? There would still be 
prodigious piles of refractory material; and certainly 
something very unpleasant and unfortunate would 
happen if there were not. But some extremely valu- 
able qualities would be saved from obscurity by a cer- 
tain spiritual specific gravity in their possessors, by 
hidden capacities to respond, as the gold button forms 
in the fire-assay when there is gold in the ore. 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 29 

And these constitute, so far as we know, — and 
that is not far, of course, — the sole raison d'ttre of 
the universe. So that you come to a rather astonishing 
realization that the business of a teacher seems to be 
to prove that our solar system is worth while ; and the 
real teacher does it. 

When it comes to finding teachers for different sub- 
jects, there is a certain area within which you can 
capture real teachers if you have a clear idea of their 
habits, and can therefore recognize one when you see 
him. Against a background of school-routine these rare 
spirits are often indistinguishable, except to a hunter 
of discrimination. 

Many a teacher-hunter goes out with a net like the 
Roman reticularius, which he throws over something 
that looks inviting, without considering, without hav- 
ing the experience or the understanding to warn him, 
that for one real teacher there are ten imitations, and 
that these imitations are either terrible things to get 
entangled with and may easily "bite you first," as the 
saying is, or else are too thin and watery, and in both 
cases, therefore, useless as nutriment in his school. 

You may remember a dialogue by the roadside be- 
tween a young and curious angel and a hard-working 
spider in Stephen's "Demigods." Mostly, he said, he 
caught thin little flies without much eating on them; 
but that was better luck than the lad below with the 
thick hairy legs had, for yesterday he caught a wasp. 

"What did he do then?" inquired the angel. 

" Don't ask him, sir; he don't like to talk about it," 
said the spider. 



30 SHACKLED YOUTH 

The area in which you are likely to find real teachers 
is not the school-area only. In the public schools you 
are confined to certified people — professional teachers. 

Does it not seem unfortunate that a superintendent 
of discretion should not be able to use non-professional 
people who are peculiarly qualified to teach certain 
subjects? This is the privilege of the private school 
and of the college, and it is a privilege rarely abused. 
But the *' safeguarding of public institutions" peremp- 
torily forbids it. 

When the president of a college wants a man to 
teach history, for instance, he has a right and a duty 
to pick the very best man he can afford. President 
Eliot picked Henry Adams to teach mediaeval history 
at Harvard. Adams had never taught before, and 
did n't want to teach at all; but such was the Presi- 
dent's way with people he invited, that Adams taught 
the mysteries and obscurities of mediaeval history for 
six years. 

If you have read his book, "Mont St. Michel and 
Chartres," you can easily understand President Eliot's 
determination to have that man on that subject. In 
other words, it would be an excellent thing if teachers 
could be taken where found, and not always out of 
the confinement of the normal school and the teachers' 
college. 

When it comes to a teacher of history, you would 
think that such a teacher must be capable also of 
teaching natural history and geography. 

There are too many compartments in schools. Edu- 
cation is all of one piece, and yet a school is a place of 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 31 

compartments. They try to join things up; but you 
can't join things up very well that are so separated by 
walls and by textbooks and by narrow minds, with 
their partitions over which there is not much oppor- 
tunity for children to look. 

Even music must be taught — if it is to be ade- 
quately taught — by those, and those only, who are 
much more than musicians. Nothing is deadlier than 
the effect produced on a child by a music-teacher who 
knows of little but music — who is incapable of con- 
necting music with all art and all experience. 

The history teacher must in some way account for 
history. And when you are called upon to do that, 
then you are compelled to go back of the recent, to 
those huge foundations laid in century piled upon 
century of astronomical time. To such a teacher the 
Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal man, the Glacial Epoch, 
and rivers and mountain-ranges, are even more inter- 
esting than the Punic Wars and the Crusades. 

It happened that I knew one geography teacher — 
a man; and it happens that I also know one his- 
tory teacher — a woman. A woman, and an elderly 
woman; a woman who understands that the history 
for her children must be the philosophy of history, and 
who therefore has to teach natural history and arrive 
at human history as human history was actually ar- 
rived at ; and who knows as much of geography as of 
history, and loves it with an equal passion. 

Having, as Stevenson says, ** thrown her soul and 
body down for God to plough them under," she has 



32 SHACKLED YOUTH 

grown up out of that furrowed field with a certain 
fierceness of joy in life, that can best be contained in 
the robust and tireless body which fifty years have 
seemed only to tune to pitch, and to leave humming 
to the great winds of heaven. And yet such a simple 
woman, without an affectation, without a single pose, 
without self -consciousness, without pride of intellect, 
with apparently nothing but prodigious good- will, 
gigantic good sense, and brimming good-humor, and 
unlimited patience, and an energy and interest and 
curiosity equal to the sum of the energies and interests 
and curiosities of all the children in the school. 

Ypu would not think that this plain elderly lady, of 
Quaker ancestry and Quaker bearing, had traveled 
most of the trails of history on her own feet ; that she 
read Latin and Greek quite as well as she read German ; 
and that she spoke three languages. Nor would you 
think that she knew as much about the literature and 
music of nations as she did of their history. Is there no 
place for a Leonardo like this in a school — in a public 
school? 

There is a place, and I will tell you where : it is every- 
where. But it is especially in the eighth, ninth, and 
tenth grades, in the ages of fourteen to sixteen, in 
that restless and dreaming age, the age of adolescence, 
of great beauty and potential danger. And in these 
grades she taught. 

I have been jnany times in her classroom — that is, 
I have been present on occasions when she was teach- 
ing, her classroom being as often in a ditch by the 
road as in a building. 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 33 

But I first met the lady sitting alone in front of the 
Hermes of Praxiteles in the little museum at Olympia, 
whither she had come on a donkey from some obscure 
part of the Peloponnesus, talking modern Greek with 
the peasants as she passed along their vineyards. 

"Before this thing my soul is prostrate," she whis- 
pered as she rose. Afterward, we walked beside the 
Alpheus, and "Listen!" she said; "there's some live 
Greek history, the exact thing!" 

It was the frogs of Aristophanes, — the hrack-ki-ki- 
wax, brack-ki-ki-waXy — totally unlike any sound of 
frogs I had ever heard ; and there they were, at home, 
as usual, in their old river! 

The last time I saw her she was standing by a road- 
side in New England, with a turtle in her hand, en- 
gaged in unveiling the mysteries of sex to a group of 
ten-year-old boys in such a way, with such directness 
and such delicacy, as Fabre himself might have used 
in speaking of these things with his own boys and 
girls. Wherever she went she was quietly building 
bridges over places where fatal acidents might happen 
to children through the ignorance or timidity or lazi- 
ness of parents. 

What teacher of natural history do you know who 
is capable of making her subject the occasion to illumi- 
nate for pupils the origin of life and processes of repro- 
duction, so that thereafter the vulgarities and familiari- 
ties of the less fortunate can only repel these young 
people, the truth about this matter having made them 
free from the contagion that breeds in unenlightened 
minds? 



34 SHACKLED YOUTH 

But schools have to leave that sex-question out; 
yes, democratic institutions must be safeguarded, and 
therefore they have to leave out almost everything 
that is really important. 

If I describe the schoolroom in which this teacher 
meets her classes during the school year, you will learn 
yet more about her, because the rooms people live in 
always reflect pretty accurately their lives and minds. 

One side is occupied by windows, and almost half 
the windows are occupied by aquariums, so arranged 
that the light comes through the water from the top; 
and the quiet, cool effect produces an antidote to the 
feverishness of schoolrooms in general. 

The opposite wall is covered by a map of Europe, 
Asia, and Africa, in the flat relief so exquisitely worked 
out by Georg Thomsen, showing the mountain-ranges, 
river- valleys, high plateaus, and all the elevations, 
depressions, and barriers which have produced diver- 
sity of life, and have therefore produced natural history 
and human history as it was and is and evermore 
shall be. 

On shelves everywhere are fossils and relics — As- 
syrian, Egyptian, Etruscan, Roman, Greek; Archaeo- 
logical, Palaeontological, Geological. 

At the upper end of the room are two statues, each 
about four feet high : one of the Stone-Age Man, and 
near it a reproduction of St. Gauden's Lincoln. I 
could easily guess that those two figures had a very 
definite significance in that room, without anything at 
all being said about them. 

At the other end of the room stands an equally large 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 35 

reproduction of Barnard's great symbolic statue, The 
Two Natures. 

Now history taught in a room with these things in 
it might still be dull and profitless. But you might be 
pretty sure, to say the least, that the teacher who put 
these statues in a history classroom, — who had to go 
to great trouble and expense to get them, no doubt, — 
was quite likely to be a teacher of history who pro- 
posed to make that subject contribute something more 
than names, places, and dates to the minds of children. 
A certain intelligence of the heart was evident there. 
It was not difficult to see that she proposed to connect 
her children up with history, and, in some sense, pro- 
mote an allegiance to that mysterious upward thrust 
which we call ''good-will," which is the only worth- 
while thing ever produced or to be produced, except 
beauty — and it is, of course, a part of that. 

And yet there would be no moralizing. You heard 
both, sides ; you took your choice. When a case is ade- 
quately presented, choosing is not so difficult. 

Perhaps most of the mistakes in ethics everywhere 
are due to the misfortune of never having heard the 
case presented as it ought to be to conform to the 
truth of the matter. 

If you look at Barnard's statue long enough, you 
learn certain things which thereafter help to deliver 
you from your adversary. And yet Barnard never 
made that statue for that purpose — or for any other 
purpose except the recondite purposes of art. 

Nevertheless, art cannot escape its ministrations, 
protest as it will. 



36 SHACKLED YOUTH 

A much abridged statement of what this teacher had 
to say one evening, at a meeting of the Parents' and 
Teachers' Association, on the subject of history, will 
further illustrate her way of looking at things in her 
department, and also her theory of the relation which 
should exist between a school and its pupils. 

She spoke in that confidential, quiet manner of the 
person who gives you something, rather casually than 
by design, out of a great store of experience, quite as 
if you knew it already, — as if everybody knew it, — 
but, lest you might forget it, she would remind you. 
And while you listened, you increasingly, and, finally, 
intensely realized that here was one of those burning 
bushes of Moses — which it was well for you to have 
turned aside to see. 

She began by saying that, as her father and her 
grandfather had both been ministers, she could rarely 
resist the temptation to use a text: it was something 
that seemed determined to come out, resist as she 
would. And when she talked about children in schools, 
she felt that there was one biblical text that covered 
the case — that expressed for all time the sort of thing 
a school should be and the attitude of parents and 
teachers toward children; and she repeated, slowly: 
"And he shall be like a tree, planted by the rivers of 
watery that bringeth forth his fruit in his season." 

"I am not going to expound this text," she said; 
"it is quite unnecessary. All you need to do is to 
repeat it, to repeat it in reference to your own son or 
your own daughter; to demand, then, that a school 
shall be more like a river of water, that flows, that 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 37 

sparkles, that lies out under the sun and the stars. And 
also, you must not be in a hurry. You must allow this 
tree of yours, planted by this river, time and space — 
leisure to grow in, quiet to grow in, so that in his sea- 
son, not in your season, he may bring forth his fruit. 

"The entire philosophy of education is there — 
from Rousseau to Dewey. 

"But I am supposed to-day to talk to you about 
history — that is my subject. You want to know 
what sort of a history teacher I am. Then you must 
come to the classroom — not once, but often. How 
is it that parents go so seldom to see their little trees, 
to see what sort of irrigation they get at school? 

" I wonder whether you will agree with me as to the 
origin of history — of human history. 

"Human history started in the sun. — Why, of 
course; why not? The trouble is, you never heard 
anybody say so before, did you? The trouble is that 
people don't go back far enough to arrive at the root 
of things. All the seething and boiling and explosive 
energy was inherited from that perfectly impossible 
conflagration we call the sun. So easy to call it that — 
'the sun'; but what is it? Do you suppose anybody 
^wow5 what it is? Not a living soul ! But at any rate, 
the earth is a minute piece of it, cooled off but still kept 
going by the heat and the light from the original lump. 

''The gases, condensed, made water, and the chem- 
icals, in the water, acted upon by the sun's rays, made 
protoplasm. The inorganic got worked into the organic 
by one of these miracles that only time can perform. 

"And in that protoplasm were things as incredible, 



38 SHACKLED YOUTH 

as incomprehensible, as huge, as turbulent, as fierce, 
and as fiery as the sun itself. The single word for the 
whole thing is Energy. Now there are two predom- 
inating elements in this protoplasmic energy, and they 
are two expressions of solar energy, I suppose, simply 
transformed and finding a new expression. These are 
Hunger and Fear; and they are confronted by two 
other very strange and violent ingredients, namely, 
Love and Death. 

''So, you see, with stuff in it like this, history is 
bound to be, not only extremely dramatic, but even 
tragic. History is a mixture; it is a bowl as large as 
the earth, at any rate, filled with the most terrible 
brew concentrated from star-dust, from violent gases 
and flames, from water and air and dirt of every sort, 
and it boils everlastingly. 

"What we propose to do in school is to get a little 
of the odor of it and a little of the taste of it. We are 
in the pot ourselves, but for the time being we must 
get outside the pot. 

"And then, history is part of our present daily in- 
timate life: history is not just a story! Is your own 
past life history? Is n't it the most vivid and intense 
history to you, and a big part of your present life, 
and is there any story of it? History is life a day or 
two past, — life forty centuries past, — and history is 
part of us. And the accounts of history are often the 
feeble mumblings of old stick-in-the-muds, who, in a 
frantic effort to 'embrace the subject,' as they would 
say, were squeezed to death hy ity were turned to stone 
because they were false lovers, or too rash. 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 39 

"'Here is the earth/ says Emerson, 'complete in 
every detail — sound as a nut ; but the theories of the 
earth, and the accounts of the earth, are things of 
shreds and patches/ 

"And while I am on the subject, I might as well go 
a bit further. The life of the past is significant to us 
because it is the life of men, women, and children 
very much like us, although in different skins and 
costumes. 

"And that means this: it means that it would not 
be worth a moment's thought, if the bulk of it was 
really only a mass of wars and the perfectly atrocious 
antics of most of the folks on top — their speeches 
and their parades. 

"You understand this, and you understand the 
inner nature of society. // is the little things that count. 
What is it that keeps the earth fruitful — that is, that 
keeps the soil which we depend on for producing veg- 
etable life from becoming sodden and unproductive? 

"Earth-worms! Now what is that curious statistic 
about these beasts? Why, as I remember it, the whole 
surface of the land — that is, arable land — goes 
through the long muciferous stomach of the worm- 
tribe every five years or ten years — something like 
that. 

"The soil of Society is worked by this same myriad 
of swallowers and digesters and excreters, and out of 
it therefore things grow — heroes grow, and artists, 
poets, and musicians. Let old Carlyle talk about his 
heroes — and how gloriously he does it! The fact is 
that it was all in the black dirt of the hero's ancestry, 



40 SHACKLED YOUTH 

the dirt he goes back into when his day above the sur- 
face is done; and his works frequently follow him. 

"One thing has saved society from rotting at the 
core — or, I should say, two things ; two things in the 
life of man make it worth while — worth talking about 
and worth thinking about. The two things are Virtue 
and Suffering — Courage and Pain. 

" Did you ever realize that the man who wrote Reve- 
lation, the Book of the Revelation, — the man John 
of Patmos, — was a tremendous mural painter? Do 
you read Revelation much? Well, read it, and let that 
pageantry work on your mind. One of these scenes 
illustrates the inhabitants of the Earth, the inhabit- 
ants whose courage had raised them into a great light 
— a light that illuminated those millions of eager faces 
and stretched arms and fingers as they sang there an 
oceanic sort of song like one of Bach's or Palestrina's ; 
and underneath that picture John wrote, 'These are 
they who have come up out of great tribulation.' 

"History is the threshing — the terrific threshing — 
of life ; that 's history : that is what we are studying. 

"Two great flails — Time and Chance, or Time and 
Destiny — beat down on the groaning centuries and 
the wheat and chaff get separated. So much suffering, 
so much bewilderment, so much failure — and so much 
courage. 

"But, you understand, this mangled and disfigured 
body of human history is like Samson's old lion that 
lay where he left it, torn in two, by the road. ' Out of 
the strong cometh forth sweetness.' Out of the vitals 
of history comes whatever is lovely and of good report, 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 41 

and the chaff gets blown into the place that is reserved 
for chaff — not a bad place, but a place where chaff 
can be used. Not a bit of it is wasted; nothing is 
wasted. 

"See here — here is a little piece of clay; what is it? 
It 's an Assyrian book. On a book just like this, writ- 
ten four thousand years before Christ and dug out of 
the hot sand in Arabia the other day, are these words 
in cuneiform : — 

"Trembling one, pursued by Evil, dash 
thyself against the bosom of thy God. 

"And have we anything new to say to-day? Have 
we found any substitute at all? 

"The next time you sing Dr. Newman's hymn, *Lux 
Benigna,' — 'Lead, Kindly Light,' — remember this 
old Assyrian! 

"Now I propose to talk to your children about these 
things in some way or other which they can under- 
stand, so that they may appreciate a little, perhaps, 
what they have come from, and may not be fooled too 
much by the racket, by the maddening slam-banging 
and apparent speed of the present; by people making 
deafening noises and proposing impossible things. It 's 
slow — it 's fearfully slow — it will never be anything 
but slow! 

"For instance, suppose we were talking about the 
Nile. I should hope to make them visualize that old 
Nile, so slow and so muddy, but so beneficent to Egypt 
just because it was slow and muddy. It was opaque, 
and it was full of fecundity. Things grew because of it, 



42 SHACKLED YOUTH 

things grew amazingly, and see what happened : Egyp- 
tian civilization brought forth its fruit in its season. 

" Now, whether this Egyptian civilization was worth 
all the time spent on it, they will have to determine 
themselves after they know more about it. 

"Civilizations happen just the way the Nile mud 
happens — there is no choice about it. They are de- 
posits ; and if, out of all the mixture of mud and water, 
passions and tears, and centuries of sunlight to stew 
in and to bake in; if, after all the frenzies and terrors 
of conflict, the endless and deadly toil of generations 
of slaves, there is a residue of something very precious 
and very rare as a contribution to the human spirit, 
to science and to art and to religion, then it was worth 
while — and they will see that there was. 

"They are going to tell me all about it. They are 
going to write delightful essays on that subject; they 
are going to museums and libraries ; they are going to 
have a perfectly grand time living in old Egypt if we 
— you and I — will assist them a little. 

"You see, my dear people, a, schoolroom must be 
a high place — a place from which we can see off 
and see enough to excite our most intense interest and 
curiosity. Things started there have got to carry. We 
have to put that old discredited stuff they called ' phlo- 
giston ' into the lives of children, to keep them from 
becoming soggy. 

" I look out of my school-window across the street, 
to a large wholesale millinery store, and see that pro- 
cession of girls in and out of that establishment, each 
one clothed in the latest mode — all their little goods, 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 43 

as the saying is, in the show-window. What would you 
do? What 's a school for? Where else will they get this 
thing in the shape they can get it here? A school that 
clarifies the selections, the ethics, the interests, the 
tastes of its pupils, that heads them positively toward 
that furnishing of the interior as opposed to the fur- 
nishing of the exterior, which you see over there, — 
a school that teaches the 'Mystery of Life and its 
Arts,' as Ruskin had it, — is an educational establish- 
ment; otherwise not; otherwise absolutely not! 

"I want to know whether the keels of men and 
women are laid the way they used to be. I don't know. 
Down at Fairhaven last summer they were building 
a four-masted schooner. It was a magnificent thing, 
prodigious, standing there in its ribs "and bones only, 
and apparently equal to any kind of strain and stress, 
besides having that subtle, indescribable beauty of a 
ship, even in this early stage. Everything they built 
into her helped — helped her strength and helped her 
beauty too ; that was perfectly plain. 

"How about children? Does everything we build 
into them help their strength and beauty, do you 
think? Really, it is a lucky thing that they are able 
to resist or escape a great deal of it. They have a cer- 
tain protective coloration and a certain impervious- 
ness, which may be there because, if it was n't, the 
world wouldn't get on; the necessary faith in itself 
wouldn't survive; disillusionment would set in, and 
the game would be up. 

''But one day I asked an old whaling captain who 
lives down on the ' Drift Road,' as they call it, whether 



44 SHACKLED YOUTH 

he had seen that vessel up there. 'Oh, yes,' he said, 
' I was there when they was stretchin' of the keel; and 
I '11 say this — they ain't puttin' the keels into vessels 
now that they used to.'" 

One evening, at her house, instead of talking over 
these very profound and serious things, we devoted 
part of the time to trying to locate a tree- toad, and 
part to playing with her Amazonian monkey, 

''Let me introduce you to a child of a million years 
ago," she said, as she brought in the creature with his 
quizzical face, a little black hand wrapped around his 
owner's thumb. "Just think — here's one of those 
early efforts of nature to get herself humanized, to get 
herself sinning and repenting, sinking hospital ships, 
singing the ' Messiah,' weighing the planets, painting, 
praying, writing, massacring, educating. — What a 
mess it is! 

"And what can an individual do, tell me that, but 
just distribute such little gifts as he has to give, which 
increase the chances for happiness by increasing the 
appetite for — what? The things of the spirit. And 
for the teacher there is but one way, one way by which 
you can keep going. You have to take in a very great 
deal more than you give out. And then you have to 
wait. You must have seclusion — enough seclusion 
in which to wait, to 'suspend judgment,' as Powys 
says; to 'wait upon the Lord,' as the Bible says; and 
by some such process, — by waiting after having done 
your job each day, and each year, — you renew your 
strength. 



A TEACHER OF HISTORY 45 

"Look there, at your feet — do you see that little 
green light, like the starboard light of a tiny ship? 
That 's the larva of the firefly. He 's going to carry 
that light down underground, away below the frost- 
line, and he 's going to bring it up again in June and 
flash it in the air, and at last transmit it to his heirs, 
to the children of light." 

On my way home, through the massive shadows and 
mysterious presences of trees, with a great glory of 
stars arched overhead and the autumnal cricket chant- 
ing his own In excelsiSj I felt as anyone would feel who 
comes from even a very casual conversation with that 
teacher : that almost all of us have gone through life 
without catching fire from a source like this — a 
source where high emotions glow, burn, sparkle, flame 
up into passionate, resolute, and tireless effort to refine 
the ore of life. Therefore, we remain, if not a little stony 
and cynical, at least rather damp with doubts and 
reservations, or very sure that personal or corporate 
or political efficiency will make the paths straight 
through the wilderness. The American mind opens 
and closes; but in general, and in comparison with the 
European mind, it is generously open, and its spirit 
is still capable of being set alight. That has been the 
effort of the great school-man at Washington, namely, 
to light these millions of inward flames from his own. 
And that is the mission of every real teacher every- 
where. 

But that inward fire — what a rare thing and how 
beyond all telling is its worth, fed from these emotions 



46 SHACKLED YOUTH 

which go back into the darkest recesses of human 
history! 

Among the tall grass, briars, and weeds of the twen- 
tieth century, all drenched with the rains of modern- 
ity, of hurry and violence, how steadily and clearly 
that old emotion burns; how buried, but how immor- 
tal, that '* Lux Benigna" of Cardinal Newman, that 
"Lux Perennis" of an ancient verse of plain-song 
taken from the black bag of medisevalism and sung 
so beautifully by the students at Princeton the other 
day, in their desire to express in the loftiest and holiest 
manner their sorrow and their faith in remembrance 
of the boys who died fighting for what they believed, 
and what we believe, to be some Kingdom of Light: — 

Jam sol recedit igneus, 
Tu Lux Perennis Unitas, 
Nostris beata Trinitas, 
Infunde lumen cordibus. 

As fade the fires of the Sun, 
Thou, Light Eternal, Three in One, 
O ever-blessed Trinity, 
Illuminate our hearts, we pray. 



IV 
THE SCHOOL SHOP 

The significance of the shop in the grade school, or 
even in the high school, is not understood in its total 
bearing on the development of children and the society 
for which they are being prepared. 

If you are content — as most schools imply by their 
standard processes — with society as it is, and if you 
expect and hope for nothing very different, then things 
may remain more or less as they are, with the shop in 
the very inferior place in which it is found, and with 
the people who teach in shops wholly unequal to the 
magnificent opportunity afforded. At the bottom of 
this comparative indifference to the school shop is the 
philosophy: a social philosophy on which the world's 
institutions, even of the standard democratic type, 
may smash up — that the hand may be dishonored 
with impunity. By dishonored, I mean that hand- work 
may be considered inferior to brain- work, to such an 
extent that the disparity between the rewards has, in 
the industries, reached the elastic limit, and prompt 
and copious adjustments in the other direction are 
imperative. 

There is no health or promise of longevity in any 
society that consists of a huge mass of Nibelungen — 
spiritually, mentally, and sometimes physically, under- 
ground — beating incessantly on the anvils of their 
monotonous tasks ; and at the other end the people of 
Walhalla, engaged in intrigue and exploitation, in the 



48 SHACKLED YOUTH 

great game of industrial production, and, as a result 
of it all, poisoning the air with their banalities. 

Between these two extremes wanders at present a 
rather bewildered multitude, convinced of but one 
thing on the whole, namely, that climbing up into 
the seats of the scornful leisure class is the important is- 
sue in life, overrating the brain-worker, underrating 
the hand-worker, their own hands hanging, — rather 
limply, — rattling knives, spoons, and forks; largely 
uninformed, unskilled, wasted. 

Too many people confess without shame that they 
"can't use their hands." 

Do they know or care, I wonder, that the only reason 
why a brain-worker has a brain is because his ancestor, 
that blue-faced, grimacing, arboreal apparition, had 
a hand — a small, black, sinuous hand — with an oppos- 
able thumb? It picked things up and gazed intently 
at them in its shifty, nervous way — dropped them, 
picked them up, took apart anything that would come 
apart, and then put it together again. Got a stick and 
dug a hole with it; got a stone and beat nuts with it; 
tied the stone to the stick, and was electrified by the 
results. And so, painfully, agonizingly, while geologic 
ages crept by — under the same sun, moon, and stars 
that light us on our confident way, our poor ancestors' 
hands built your nest and mine, O complacent one! 
Will you then forget this? Is there any point of honor 
involved in this matter of hand- work? 

Whether there is or no, you are involved. You can- 
not longer neglect the sources of sanity and strength ; 
and these are not in brains, but in brains plus hands. 



THE SCHOOL SHOP 49 

And out of brains and hands combined comes that 
spiritual thing which alone irrigates the life of men — 
the thing which, after thirty years as carpenter's son 
and carpenter, produced a man capable of stooping to 
the earth before the Magdalen, and asking that most 
penetrating question of the brain-workers standing 
there with their stones; and, in his profound oriental 
way, telling those immortal stories of the Good Samari- 
tan and the Prodigal Son. Will you trace that gene- 
alogy back to the black hand of the ape and then not 
reverence that hand and all hands? 

The old school-system, under which the writer suf- 
fered, was, of course, far worse than the present one 
in respect to this shop question. But then the life of 
families was much more manual than it is now. There 
were no telephones or electric lights, very few theatres 
and these expensive, no amusement parks, no auto- 
mobiles, no moving pictures; in fact, there was a very 
different standard of interests. It was much more 
common to make things that could be made than to 
buy them, and children did more housework. Mother 
was not so apt to be either a "great lady" or an imi- 
tation of one, with a charming manner but defective 
discrimination. And father was not diverted by an au- 
tomobile and a golf-stick to a condition of almost total 
futility so far as teaching his children was concerned. 

Mother and father taught the boys and girls very 
many very important things involving both hands and 
brains. Since they stopped, we have Domestic Science 
and Manual Training in schools. But they are still 
occupying humble places. The school person does not 



50 SHACKLED YOUTH 

yet admit the value of shops in the school. He still 
sees mostly the formulae dictated by the high schools 
and colleges in the form of "requirements." To be 
"educated" or not, is to pass or not pass the tests of 
the school people. You may be "educated" and still 
be able to pass those tests ; but there are many chances 
that you can pass them only by stultifying yourself. 

However that may be, it is well to consider this, 
that under the greenness and blossoming and fruitage 
of the mind there are certain very deep foundations, 
namely, the work of men's hands. 

And if you get a generation of people to thinking 
that the vegetation that grows out of this soil is so 
superior to it that it can afford to insulate itself, why 
then you get a generation whose strength has clean 
gone out of it, like the strength of Antaeus held off the 
earth by Hercules. 

Teachers, lawyers, ministers, statesmen, writers, and 
business-men must be only phantoms and something 
less than real when they are in touch only with their 
own kind, and shut off from this other kind, whose 
opinion, though slow and sometimes inarticulate, after 
all is the final opinion, because the whole organic chem- 
istry of society can be produced only by the salts which 
they supply. There is a very strong current in our 
affairs even to-day, running from a region known as 
Feudalism, which is not any particular place in history 
so much as a particular area in the human heart, and 
one of the coldest and darkest. And this feudalistic 
polar current can chill a great many generous efforts 
in school and out. 



THE SCHOOL SHOP 51 

And yet, too, hand-work needs always to be inter- 
preted to itself, in order to feel itself an integral part of 
all that is beautiful and illuminative. It cannot be 
merely vocational ; it cannot be postponed to the high- 
school period. It belongs in the elementary school, 
and should be given there the space and the time its 
importance demands, namely, as much space and time 
as any most favored subject. Over the door of such 
a school, you could then write these two words of 
Horace, — ** Integer vitse," — meaning wholeness of 
life, symmetry of life, soundness of life, and, therefore, 
poise and strength of life. 

May I describe a shop and a shopman as, let us say, 
they exist in the school at X. 

The shop is on the ground floor, with a special yard 
of its own, secluded and remote from the violence of 
the general school- grounds. Over all the walls of this 
shop are maps, blue prints of locomotives and cars, 
big colored posters of steamers and sailing vessels, old 
models of all sorts, but especially of ships, besides in- 
numerable samples of the work of pupils past and 
present. Lathes and racks of tools, benches, shavings 
and lumber, a band-saw and other machine-saws. And, 
strange to say, some enlightened school board allowed 
a great fireplace, with a big clay head of Pan plastered 
on the front of it by the teacher, and a potter's wheel 
and kiln in a corner, where people with impulses to- 
ward pots and tiles and glazes can express themselves. 

It is evident that the school board is only too 
happy to leave this department alone, except to supply 
anything it wants — when and as it wants it. When 



52 SHACKLED YOUTH 

you find a spring in a thirsty land, you do not fill it 
with mud and gravel, unless you are an average school 
board passing that way, dragging the clanking school- 
machine in a cloud of dust. 

Outside this schoolroom the children have built a 
harbor for ships. Down to the harbor goes the village 
street, with the miniature houses of the community, 
the wharfs and wharf-buildings; and at anchor in the 
"stream' ' lie the model vessels : schooners, square-rigged 
clippers, and craft of various sorts, built and rigged by 
boys and girls; and, lovely to behold, with one perfect 
poem by the "old man" — the Santa Maria of 1492. 
There they swing to their moorings, reflect themselves 
in the water, and brush against the jewel-flower leaning 
over the side. Here new vessels are constantly launched 
and old ones refitted, houses repaired and replaced, 
furnished, and fenced. 

In the shop, locomotives and cars, air-planes, steam- 
ships and destroyers, submarines and chasers, houses 
and furniture, and every sort of thing that goes with 
this teacher's plan of manual training, are made. 

** We made the harbor out of concrete," he tells me, 
"and laid out the town, and planted the things, and 
started the water, and, by the gods! Nature adopted 
it at once. Within an hour there was a water-skipper 
rowing himself across, and the green and brown dra- 
gon-flies did acrobatics over it; and, best of all, after 
we had a lot of fish in it, one day we heard the exciting 
rattle of the belted kingfisher — and there he sat, like 
an Indian chief, and, if you please, he dived in and 
got one of our biggest ones! 



THE SCHOOL SHOP 53 

"You see, we make houses with things in them. 
But we get the drawings of actual houses from archi- 
tects, and scale them down, and go by the drawings. 
Or we make our own drawings, as we did for the simple 
houses of the fishing village. Girls would rather make 
houses than anything else, and the furniture — maybe 
that is unfortunate, but it is true. Their adventure is 
a house-adventure; they seem to know it — God knows 
how! And think how many of them are going to be 
poor little 'apartment' creatures. Ah, what a shame! 
what a shame! All that mysterious power, and that 
most exquisite aroma of the woman and her household, 
sterilized by these stony compressors of life — these 
apartments ! I read recently Hudson's * Far Away and 
Long Ago ' — there was a household for you ! 

'' So we make houses, and nothing but good houses — 
with proportions and window-spacing right and roof- 
lines right. And then we furnish them, from cellar 
to attic: beds and bathtubs, looking-glasses, chairs 
and tables; and we live in our houses, we sing in them, 
we love them and the grounds around them. We do 
everything the best way — considering our age ; not 
the second best or the third best. I think I am more 
interested in girls than in boys, because, after all, they 
are the determining factors — if they will only stick; 
if they refuse to allow the temperature of modern life 
to evaporate their fertility, — you know what I mean, 
— mental, moral and physical. 

"Now take this business of making ships. If you 
can get a feeling for ships into boys and girls, what 
can you get along with it? Oh, lots of things, of course. 



54 SHACKLED YOUTH 

but, among them, this — the beauty of economized 
strength and the ugliness of waste. There is n't a thing 
about a ship that is not necessary, and there is n't a 
thing that is not compressed into the smallest dimen- 
sions compatible with the strength required. There 
is no technique so organic, so moulded by nature's 
forces, as the technique of shipbuilding. And the result 
is, you get about the most beautiful thing a man ever 
made. 

Don't waste yourselves,' I tell them, 'unless you 
want to be a scow, something to be forever towed 
about, a flat-chested, slab-sided drag on the universe.' 
And then there 's all the historical romance and geo- 
graphical significance of ships. 

*'We read a good deal about old Salem, about that 
Derby family and the boys they bred then, who com- 
manded East Indiamen when they were twenty-five, 
— * The Clipper Ship Era ' ; that 's a great book, — 
and we read all sorts of things, from Conrad and Mase- 
field and Richard Dana. 

''When I have my own school, it will be where you 
can look out every window onto the level, blue, flash- 
ing sea, with gulls swaying and screaming. And after 
school, down we tumble into all kinds of boats, with 
red turbans and sashes, ear-rings and knives, wooden 
legs and black spots, and trim the sheets for our own 
Treasure Island where we have things buried — espe- 
cially some kind of grub. 

"And here are our locomotives. We got drawings; 
you can't make anything produce the illusion that it 's 
a real thing, that you're only looking at it from a long 



THE SCHOOL SHOP 55 

way off, unless you get proportions right. As soon as 
you do that, you see, even though this Pacific type 
six-coupled passenger locomotive is only 18 inches long, 
it's got weight, what? and dignity, and the atmos- 
phere of a whole railroad. You can hear it sizzle, can't 
you? 

"The locomotive is a wonderful symbol of human 
integrity. The people who make locomotives have 
simply got to be honest to the core. You can make 
plenty of things with bad spots in them which won't 
show up. There are too many people who could n't 
possibly be trusted to make a machine like this. Sound- 
ness of heart, — integrity, — that 's the first requisite 
of the locomotive-builder. 

"And we worked on Santa Marias, having got a 
great send-off by reading up bits of Hakluyt, and 
things about Prince Henry of Portugal, and an article 
by some fellow explaining the war — explaining how 
the discovery of America had taken the pressure off 
Europe, but now the pressure was on again. Well, I 
made mine as carefully as I could, because it was a 
lovely subject. 

"Look at her! Spain and the Cape Verde Islands! 
Dagos with red sashes and big pistols and knives and 
hairy chests. And the old man up there, smelling his 
way across the meridians, walking up and down, talk- 
ing in low tones, day after day, two months — when, 
bang! a light ashore, and the land of Abraham Lincoln 
at daybreak. 

"And there's the Fram over there, with the stack 
and the foreyard : the Fram of Nansen and Amundsen — 



56 SHACKLED YOUTH 

a great boat. Oh, we know all about her, and about 
the Thetis and the Bear and the Albatross; and we 
know about the men, from Dr. Kane down, any- 
how. We've read all their stuff; and what stuff it is! 
Is n't it funny they never get going on this sort of 
thing upstairs? [In the schoolrooms.] 

"We read the things that Scott and Shackleton did 
just the other day — Shackleton going back, and back 
again, to get those men left behind; Shackleton is a 
great name in this shop. And there 's the Fram stand- 
ing there, with the crew down below — old Sverdrup 
and his boss and his folks, hard as iron and gentle as 
babies. There 's something fit for a man to talk about 
when he 's making the Fram — how to be brave as 
a lion, keen as a knife, but harmless as a dove; how 
to be like Nansen, Amundsen, Scott, and the rest. 

"We talk of these things, and I have an idea it goes 
in ; I don't know — nobody knows — it's all a gamble, 
of course. But that 's what the Fram was built for — 
to get that idea across. What honesty and directness, 
and the pure stuff there is out in the open and among 
this sort of people! And look at the environment of 
these poor children, the quality of the days and nights 
of their parents. The richer they are, the worse it is : 
a terrible mess, that 's all you can call it. 

"Do you think the war has clarified things much? 
Perhaps for many of those who were in it; but I don't 
notice much change in the people I meet, except the 
labor people. 

"Let me give you an idea what we have to say about 
labor. We made four ocean steamships. There 's one 



THE SCHOOL SHOP 57 

of them: 34 feet draft, 882 feet long, four decks above 
the gunwale. The Titanic. Oh, the things to talk 
about! Did you ever read that book, 'The Truth 
about the Titanic,' by the man who stood all night up 
to his knees in Arctic water on a raft, with seventeen 
other men, not daring to turn their heads? And old 
Captain Smith : think of the things in the mind of that 
man as his ship struck! There 's a symbol now that 's 
interesting, — that Titanic, — rushing through the 
Arctic sea, between two abysses, all ablaze with light 
and warm with its life and power; and then that cold 
finger touches it, and it trembles — and stands there 
under the impassive stars a while. I can never forget 
it. How can anybody? And I feel called upon to talk 
to these boys and girls about the Titanic. 

^' But what I was going to say was this. What won 
the war? England's merchant marine, for one thing — 
with every ship carrying on her bottom plates stokers 
and engineers through the submarine zone; with no 
show at all ; killed like rats ; never expected to survive 
— doomed from the start. Rough stuff; but, Lord, 
what fidelity ! Conspicuous bravery we know all about. 
Conspicuous bravery is easy compared with incon- 
spicuous bravery. 

** Did you ever read that 'Odyssey of a Torpedoed 
Transport'? Well, that 's what I mean, inconspicuous 
fidelity to the bitter end — ' to the final drinking of 
the consomme f as the Frenchman said. 

''Now take tools and materials," says this teacher. 
"There must be great talk of formal discipline and all 
that, where textbooks are involved, because textbooks 



58 SHACKLED YOUTH 

are the most uninteresting books in the world, and it 
is supposed by many people that the test of your char- 
acter and the hope of your future consist in whether 
or not you are able to overconie your perfectly proper 
repugnance to these textbooks. But the discipline 
of the shop is grateful. There are exceptions — some 
of them known to everybody, no doubt. There are 
children who are congenitally averse to manual occu- 
pation; but the great majority of children crave it, 
even where the conditions are unattractive; and prac- 
tically all of them would be deeply interested in it, if 
the conditions were made as congenial as they can 
easily be made. 

"And the value is in every single step of both plan 
and execution. You can plan, but cannot execute, an 
impracticable thing. And the practical thing to which 
you are reduced suppresses those extravagant fancies 
with which you began; in other words, disciplines your 
imagination. You are up against inexorable things. 
Tools are inexorable things. If they aren't used 
exactly right, there is the evidence. A square and a 
level and a plumb-bob are absolutely final and positive 
definitions; and you rejoice with an inward joy in your 
surrender to the dictates of these judges of manual 
righteousness. 

"Materials are the most perfect medium for the 
experience which shall illuminate the soul and ripen 
the mind; for they oppose your effort, and against 
that beneficent and lovely resistance you work out 
your ideas, with patience, with forethought, with skill, 
with pride, with self -revelation. 



THE SCHOOL SHOP 59 

"Take wood, the stuff we use: white pine, cedar — 
smell that!" — handing me a cedar-chip — "and 
maple and birch for things that have to be harder. 

"'How did this wood come to pass? What's the 
process? What did you have to do with it?* That *s 
what I tell them. 'And do you propose to waste this 
wonderful thing that simply cries out to you to use it 
sympathetically ? " 

"There's hickory, now. Hickory loves to be made 
into the handles of tools, and parts of wagons, things 
that are wrenched and twisted. But most of all it 
wants to be made into a bow. So we made a lot of 
hickory bows and arrows, feather- tipped and pointed. 
A nice job, that arrow-making. "And while we make 
bows and arrows, we talk about Indians and play 
Indians, and practice shooting at targets, and have 
no end of fun tracking things, with a fire and great 
talk of adventure. A teacher of manual training wants 
to know a lot of stories, and if he can tell them, he 's 
got his class nailed — they'll go with him through 
fire and flood. A man ought to have a pretty big range 
in his stories, and not be afraid to take enough time 
for them either, provided he can put them over right. 
And when he can't tell them, he can read them. Take 
a thing like 'Wolf, the Storm-Leader.' I assure you 
there are parts of that thing I actually can't read, it 
has such an intense appeal. And then there 's the 
boyhood of John Muir, for instance; and lots of good 
stuff besides. There 's Beebe writing astonishing things 
in the 'Atlantic,' or McFee — fellows like that. If 
they used these things upstairs, I would n't have to; 



6o SHACKLED YOUTH 

but they don't and they won't. Do they ever think of 
Fabre, for instance, in connection with their nature 
study? Never! Never once! 

"A manual-training teacher has the best chance in 
the whole school to connect up with life — with ethics, 
with romance. Yes, I know it: even the people who 
have these things in them are timid about exposing 
them. The other kind of person, who as likely as not 
is the school principal, shoots off some poison-gas in 
the shape of 'practical' things to work at. Lord, the 
superintendents I have known!" 

They work days in this fascinating shop, and nights 
too; and all work is interrupted frequently for talks 
or for a song or a story, while the instructor smokes a 
pipe and sits on the floor. 

But enough! Do you catch this thing? Do you see 
that all the pagan and Christian gods and the mystery 
and beauty and joy of life are bubbling up here in a 
human spring? And like the pool in the garden, nature 
loves it ; and children are so a part of nature that they 
would come in flocks if there were room and time. 

My idea in describing this teacher is to make one 
thing plain : that something of this point of view, some- 
thing of the elf, of the gnome, of the kinsman with 
creatures, of the intense lover of the music and poise 
and presence of things that men make and that men 
do, of books and art and people, must he in a teacher 
of children. Because this is the air children's souls 
breathe, and the bread their minds live on. And if 
happiness is worth anything in this world, — and we 



THE SCHOOL SHOP 6i 

assume that it is worth everything, — then this color 
must be a part of the composition. 

And everything else can be added to it — only seek 
first this Kingdom of Heaven. And the things that are 
added are those fine adjustments between brain and 
hand — the power to visualize clearly the job, to begin 
at the beginning, and move forward toward completion 
by sure and accurate steps, even through very in- 
tricate places. 

To do it right the first time! To do it as if you had 
done it many times before ; having done it perfectly in 
your mind, there come in all those invaluable quali- 
ties that books never stimulate. For by way of the 
hand the mind still travels the enticing road to self- 
expression and self -fulfillment and to that most price- 
less sort of happiness which is poised upon itself. 

If you say, "How fanciful this all is: there are not 
enough teachers such as you describe to answer for a 
single city school-system — and a small city at that," 
the answer must be that it is necessary to discover 
such teachers; and the managers of normal schools and 
teachers' colleges should make it their particular busi- 
ness to select the fit from the mass and return the 
unfit with great care to a life involving less disaster 
to themselves and others. Also, and again, teachers 
should he taken where found. 

And, finally, education must develop the apprecia- 
tion of our common possessions. Then we should not 
be so insanely interested in building greater and greater 
barns, thereby exciting the envy of our equally greedy 
neighbors. 



62 SHACKLED YOUTH 

There has been but one entirely adequate characteri- 
zation of the man whose genius was to lay up much 
goods for many days, namely, "Thou fool!" Children 
are the opposite from this. The light that is in them is 
not darkness. They are naturally heliotropic, but they 
are fearfully misled. They are given compasses that 
point every way, and the compass they are entitled to 
points one way only, namely, to Beauty. For under- 
neath Beauty is moral order, and moral order is the 
one thing indispensable. 



MUSIC 

If you read Fabre's ''Life of the Spider," you will 
understand how necessary it was for humanity to 
evolve or invent religions and, finally, music. "If 
there was no God," said Voltaire, or somebody equally 
reflective, "it would have been neqe^ary to invent 
one." You have to do something to escape from the 
terrible mechanism of nature, or to seem to escape. 

We must have shelters here and there, or we perish 
by the way. For what are we? We cannot all of us be 
like Colleoni, and ride our daily affairs with such a 
mien; nor can we be continually blowing on the slug- 
horn with Roland. 

For hundreds of thousands of years, our apish an- 
cestors, our Stone- Age grandparents, lived like those 
spiders of Fabre's — sinister, horrible, revolting things, 
with the intelligence of ogres. There were no soft spots 
anywhere ; even the love-affairs were deadly and loath- 
some. 

On all this the same sun and stars looked down, and 
the moon — and nature was precisely what is it now. 
And whether it was the lengthening period of child- 
hood, or whether it was the mysterious influence of 
that dazzling beauty of environment on the enlarging 
minds of these brutes, or just the beating of their hearts 
finding an outward expression in rhythm, they began 
to construct the temple of music on the geologic ribs 
of the earth, where its foundation remains secure. 



64 SHACKLED YOUTH 

And they must have found in it some immediate relief 
from the rigors of their day. 

It was a matter of beating on a log and dancing gro- 
tesquely. By the time civilization was a sparse growth 
in the Tigris Valley, they had evolved pipes and strings 
— and even the bow on the string; and now, out of 
these countless ages, — on one of the branches of the 
great tree of human experience, — grows a little fruit, 
a perfectly ripe and perfectly beautiful and perfectly 
finished thing — the violin. It is and always will be 
one of the most poignant and expressive symbols of 
the tireless effort of man to escape from himself as a 
part of the mechanism of things, and to decorate and 
disguise the realities of his life a little. First, the dance, 
then religion, then music to intensify both ; and, finally, 
music for its own sake. 

Music seems to have two main offices. It gives ex- 
pression to the emotional history of the race, to the 
joy and the torture of past life, and it compensates 
for the "shortcomings of our own day and the mean- 
nesses of labor and traffic." 

Its value is curiously underrated. It is really an 
indispensable thing, and yet it is generally considered 
a negligible thing — a thing you can get along very 
well without. You can get along very well, too, if you 
are color-blind, if you have never been able to dis- 
tinguish colors. You do not appreciate the degree of 
your misfortune. You fill up the gap with other things. 
If you do not hear music with both the outer and the 
inner ear ; if the great themes of the greatest masters 
of the world's music do not constitute for you the 



MUSIC 65 

peaks of the Delectable Mountains on your intellectual 
and emotional horizon, and contribute a dignity and 
a poise to your obscure and minute personality, your 
atomic gyrations and aimlessness in space and time, 
then you are unfortunate, because great musical 
themes are companions of such a quality, of such lofti- 
ness and yet of such lowliness, of such intimate com- 
fort and assurance, of such inspirational power and 
such immortal youth, that you need them. 

They are to be compared only with the great poetry, 
the other mountain range, upon which are the sources 
— the only springs which prevent this human exist- 
ence from becoming a wilderness, by that irrigation, 
much of it sub-soil irrigation, which keeps the spirit of 
man sustained and even joyful. Can you get along 
without the Psalms of David, or the Book of Eccle- 
siastes, or the 40th Chapter of Isaiah? Can you get 
along without Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Meredith, 
Whitman? If you can, and if you also live without the 
morning and the evening light on that other range 
called "Music," then your life is surely a flat life, and 
aridity its chief characteristic. 

A very eminent representative of an Eastern uni- 
versity, discussing the general subject of schools and 
colleges, said a surprising thing. If it were necessary, 
he asked, to drop every subject of every curriculum 
in all schools and colleges except one, what one would 
you retain as the most indispensable of all? He felt 
quite sure that, after sufficient deliberation by a jury 
representative of the best thought of all kinds of 
people, music would be found the most important 



66 SHACKLED YOUTH 

subject. He did not say why. You can work that out 
for yourself. My own inference is that it contains all 
the other subjects that are important, that are indis- 
pensable to the life of a human society, and that it is 
itself of incredible nutritive value. 

If the outstanding features of this age in which we 
find ourselves are industrialism, the organization of 
capital and labor, and the effort to produce and to 
accumulate things and money in as large quantities 
as possible, then it is quite natural, is it not, that people 
should endeavor to make a producer and accumulator 
out of Art. But all industry of Art which involves 
quantity production is a contradiction in terms. 

That is to say. Art ceases to live because it has no 
roots in the common life ; and instead of a living thing 
you have a very lifeless thing — a mere negligible 
piece of sentiment, which has lost its significance, 
quite as the motto, "God Bless Our Home," might 
hang in the hall of a disreputable house. Where there 
is a congenial soil. Art grows and also the appreciation 
of it ; but does anybody suppose this is a congenial soil 
except for the growth of fortunes made by multiple 
productions of the relics of an Art which once had 
roots, but was pulled up long ago, and is now sold over 
the counter like a drug in a bottle? 

Probably the most striking illustration of the total 
poverty of this nation in any ability to express its 
emotion in art form, that is, in the form of beauty, is 
in this scene. 

A wide city boulevard is lined on both sides with 
people packed from curb to building walls. All win- 



MUSIC 67 

dows are festoons of heads, and every projection has 
its swarm, its cluster of expectant humanity. The 
police have cleared the way. The stage is set. Several 
regiments of the A.E.F., who had fought at the Ar- 
gonne and Chateau Thierry, have arrived and will 
march down that street. Something very extraordin- 
ary has happened — something entirely novel to this 
generation. An overshadowing menace to the health 
and happiness of this nation and every nation has 
been removed, and these boys have helped to remove 
it, leaving behind many of their comrades and bringing 
others who must ride in this parade, as we shall pres- 
ently see. 

They have faced death daily for months, and have 
seen it in its worst forms and in huge quantity. The 
most intimate recesses of their souls have been pro- 
foundly stirred by the sense that they were doing a 
highly necessary thing for humanity, and would do it 
exceedingly well, and die doing it. 

The survivors are back, and here they come — grim 
lines of young men, in full battle-array, striding irresist- 
ibly forward, but on this occasion away from war, war 
having been supposedly made obsolete forevermore by 
their timely assistance. 

There is ample emotion along the sidewalks, though 
of a rather shallow sort, on the whole, as of people 
accustomed to seeing theatricals and treating this as 
one. But the significant thing is this : there were bands 
playing, and the only chance for the expression of a 
high and adequate emotion at all commensurate with 
the dignity and solemnity and inward significance of 



68 SHACKLED YOUTH 

this occasion was through those bands. Any-one with 
the most rudimentary sense of fitness would have 
known that ; any old Puritan would have known that ; 
it did n't require an artist, it just required somebody 
with a very little appreciation of what was taking 
place — and what had taken place. And what was the 
band playing? "Over There!" and " Good- morning, 
Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip." 

No wonder America, in her political life and general 
social condition since the war, has insulted her own 
dead in Flanders and France, and put them to open 
shame, by missing the whole significance of their mis- 
sion and their sacrifice, not understanding that these 
bodies were broken for them, and that in that blood 
was a most sacred covenant. It is inconceivable and 
fantastic. It is explained only in one way — no sense 
of Beauty, no response to the demands of a great emo- 
tion except by the cheap and tawdry expression of a 
dry and artificial life, a life of grimacing and street- 
walking and automobile-riding and theatre-going. 

If America can survive this civilization, and keep 
enough of that old saltiness of her earlier days — the 
salt of the Puritan and the Hollander and the English 
nobleman — to save her from rotting in this sun of 
commercial excess, it will be only because the children 
can somehow be preserved from the infection. And 
that is the subject of this paper. 

The home is either the best place in the world for a 
child, or it is not. If not, it is because those things in 
children which by nurture and growth make the best 
things in men and women — namely, self-direction, 



MUSIC 69 

courage, reverence, light-hear tedness, unselfishness, 
and a love of truth and beauty — are not appreciated 
or practised. The last item of all is undoubtedly the 
rarest, and yet it contains all the rest. 

In the earlier history of America there was less of 
this sense of Beauty than there is now, so far as Art 
went. But there was a much better sense of the sig- 
nificance of things. The important elements were not 
confused with the unimportant. People were still very 
much under the influence of a religious conviction of 
one kind or another that had been deepened by the 
Civil War. And though the expression of that convic- 
tion was almost always crude, still it was tremendously 
sincere, and was based on ideas that had some founda- 
tion in beauty after all, because the very words in 
which those ideas were expressed were the words of a 
great literature and a great style. 

The music they used most was the music of hymns 
■ — hymns written by modern hymn-writers, and usu- 
ally very poor music, which gained everything it had 
as a claim to distinction on account of its association 
with words that meant a great deal. The emotion of 
a very sturdy breed of people — of people who in- 
herited those oaken hearts of England, who by faith 
removed mountains, stopped the mouth of lions, put 
to flight the armies of the alien, subdued kingdoms 
and wrought righteousness — was in those old hymns. 
And when one hears now, as the writer did by curious 
chance the other day, one of them played on an organ, 
which filled the entire street with that discredited 
melody (not the new one by Dykes), "Rock of Ages, 



70 SHACKLED YOUTH 

Cleft for Me," one may well uncover and do some 
spiritual penance for assuming a superiority to these 
ancestors of his. 

The emotions of men cut a very deep channel 
through the confinements and obstacles, the moun- 
tains of their difficulties and the desert of their hunger 
and thirst. And when you hear one of these old hymns, 
it is as if you were looking down on the Colorado 
River, rushing between its great walls of stratified 
rock to the sea, from a source very high and obscure. 

These people were the meek who were qualified to 
inherit the earth — curiously qualified because of some 
sort of salt in them. Now I will admit that it is more 
important to have this integrity of heart — this "right 
spirit" — renewed within us, than it is to have the 
expression of that spirit in music. But no one will deny 
that, if we can have both, we ought to. And why can't 
we have both? It must be because enough people can't 
agree that both are necessary. It must be because the 
homes don't stand for it, and therefore the schools 
don't stand for it: for both teachers and children are 
produced by the homes. 

Even if we have the high and beautiful emotion, 
the expression of that emotion cannot be left to chance, 
in a world like the present. 

That expression is a proper subject for study, and 
that is where Art comes in, and where we particularly 
fail, because we are more interested in quantity than 
in quality. We feel that we have more music in the 
house if we have a cupboard filled with records for a 
self -playing instrument, than if we have a little boy 



MUSIC 71 

or girl who sings one little song or plays one little piece 
on the violin or the piano with a sense of self-expres- 
sion — the expression of his beautiful immaturity, and 
his unconscious loveliness. 

A small girl of eight or nine, the guest of an hour, a 
plain, freckled, boyish, even impish package of energy, 
suddenly said to her hostess, in a very casual way, 
among much talk of this and that, — looking at books 
and describing summer events, — and because some- 
thing was said about music: ''Yes, we have music at 
home. My brothers play : one plays the piano and one 
the violin." — ''And don't you do anything?" says the 
lady. — "I can sing and play." — "And will you right 
now?" — "Oh, yes," says the steady-eyed little ani- 
mal, and goes at once to the piano and there, in the 
sight of men and angels, is transformed into something 
so utterly lovely and unspeakably appealing, as her pure 
thread-like voice follows the simple chords she makes 
with her stubby fingers, that my friend must retire to 
recover her equilibrium. 

Now this is something elemental. This is Beauty 
at the source. And if it had been your daughter, you 
might have been proud and happy with the pride and 
happiness of one who, in his own field, finds a bubbling 
spring of water, the source of a river, and partaking of 
the nature of all great things because containing them 
all. 

A home that encourages the growth of that sort of 
thing is a good home for a child, because it is most 
likely also to encourage the growth of all the collateral 
things. 



^2 SHACKLED YOUTH 

And a home that does not propagate that sort of 
thing, once the green shoots begin to appear, is not as 
good a place for a child, because too large an area in 
the child's education is left uncultivated. He grows 
up and gets along without it. He makes up for the 
vacancy by listening to a great deal of music, good and 
bad, and much of the time listens only because some- 
body compels him to, and talking is bad form. But 
his opportunity to be a participant has been allowed 
to pass ; and it is by participation — by something 
akin to that old rite of dipping in the Jordan — that 
we are cured of certain maladies that afflict us. 

We all have various arguments, dependent on our 
own derivation mostly, as to how we are going to sus- 
tain the successive transmissions from youth to age; 
and, particularly, how we are going to prevent age 
from becoming oppressive. There are various argu- 
ments and as many experiments, but one may be 
pretty safe in saying this much — that no process 
which does not rest ultimately within a man's own 
centre of gravity, so to speak, can stand the strain. In 
other words, you have to get the joy of your later 
years mostly out of yourself. And now I am perfectly 
certain that, if you want to do children a great serv- 
ice, you will, without their being conscious of your 
purpose, invest for them in music — teach them to 
sing, and then to play on whatever instrument attracts 
them and is worth putting time on; not the mandolin, 
the guitar, the banjo. Suppose it is the oboe, or the 
English horn, the French horn, the violin or 'cello. 

Will you, do you think, ever outlive the intense 



MUSIC 73 

fascinations of the small orchestra of amateurs, or the 
string quartette of your friends? 

Here is an opportunity, for instance, for you to play 
in the small orchestra that accompanies a concert 
by your village Choral Society in the "Requiem" of 
Brahms. And if you are eighty years old or more, 
your part in that stupendous thing will do more to 
illuminate and lighten your weary way, as you go, like 
the ploughman, home, than any amount of music lis- 
tened to only. Participation is the regenerative force. 
It is like the ichor of salt water on the naked body as 
you submerge yourself in those immortal rhythms. 
And as to string quartettes, consider this scene : — 

The room is a large one, lighted only in parts where 
light is necessary, not generally lighted; and in the 
twilights along walls and ceiling the colors of things 
and the shapes of things come dimly at first, and, 
gradually, with veiled distinctness, to your eyes. In 
other words, the room itself is a quiet room, not re- 
sounding with ocular noises. It is a room that listens, 
a room in repose. Over the music-stands are little 
shades that confine the light to the scores; and before 
each stand is an amateur of your own sort, with one of 
the violin family in his hands, tuning up. 

The fact that all of you have heard the Flonzaley 
Qua,rtette many times, perhaps the day before, in 
no way modifies the intensity of your interest in your 
own quartette. It is the musical make-believe who 
is discouraged by professional excellence, by faultless- 
ness, and declines to take his own music seriously and 
ecstatically. 



74 SHACKLED YOUTH 

At the first note, if there is no sour tone in the mix- 
ture and if there is genuine 'Violin feehng," you catch 
that breeze from the enchanted land. Your own in- 
strument, adding its color to the blend, takes on a 
dignity and a significance that carry you with it into 
a rapturous companionship. 

You are tasting the cup of beauty, distilled from 
ages of human experience, in a very intimate way. 
Different composers give the flavor of different races. 
The word "distillate" is a good one with which to 
express this product. Nations seethe and boil, each 
in its own crucible, and from each arises the vapor of 
its life, the volatile and combustible stuff. Artists, 
composers, painters, writers, sculptors, are "conden- 
sers," and reduce this vapor to the rich liqueur which 
contains all the spiritual elements of that nation. 

How should you feel then, sitting before the score of 
a great master, and, through the tone of your instru- 
ment and the combined tones of the other instruments, 
tasting the wine of such a vintage? It is no wonder 
that whatever of free spirit there may be left in you 
comes forth in response to this stimulus, and some- 
where, off the earth, detached from your cumbersome 
body, which remains before the music-stand, flashes 
as the gulls flash above the rhythm of the sea. 

One of the curious lapses in the consciousness of the 
human being is his inability to observe himself — 
partly because he has n't faculties to make any crit- 
ical examination of his own faculties, and partly be- 
cause he would n't do it very frequently if he had. For 
the only way the human spirit can console itself for its 



MUSIC 75 

loneliness and its temporariness is by a strange sort 
of auto-intoxication, by a ferment of some sort which 
keeps a little flame alive, as the flame is kept alive in 
the coastwise channel- marks called *' gas-buoys." 

And so, once people — grown-up people — get an 
idea that they know the important things in life, that 
they are marking the main channels, and that music 
is not one of them, how will you convince them that 
their light is darkness? How shall they understand the 
difference between what they are and what they might 
have been, or what their children might be? 

Music from orchestras and operas and concerts of 
all sorts pours on them in torrents. Bach, Beethoven, 
and Brahms descend in floods. But you understand 
that these people are like so many slate roofs — it all 
goes off in the down-spouts and drains, and not a bit 
soaks through, to water desert places. After the con- 
cert they are as dry as before. They immediately 
revert to the old thoughts and habits; Bach and Bee- 
thoven have again lived and suffered in vain ; and most 
of the audience, though the}^ have been in the presence 
of something sacramental and profoundly significant, 
never guessed it. Even the critics of music in papers 
and magazines rarely touch the hem of the garment 
in which these huge figures, the great composers, are 
draped as they again hold up the burning soul of man, 
which glows like the Grail in their compositions. 

Of course, all these people, these impervious ones, 
whether professional or unprofessional critics, feel quite 
qualified to judge the music, and say very bright and 
intelligent things about it, from the technicalities 



76 SHACKLED YOUTH 

of the professional to the mere babble of the highly 
dressed old box-holder. 

They have not realized, and never can realize, how 
that music has judged them — and how pitiable and 
vaporish and totally inconspicuous they appeared 
against the huge background of reality. For it is their 
interests that are the illusions, and these creations of 
artists that are the realities, if there is any reality. 



VI 

LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 

Far be it from this writer to assume any more know- 
ledge of the intricacies and profundities of his subject, 
with all the implications attached thereto, than may 
easily be had by the man who passes by in the neigh- 
borhood of literature in the elementary schools, and 
turns aside to consider. 

A most significant symbol for such a situation, a 
symbol offered for the consideration of any passer-by 
who, going about his daily and quite different affairs, 
nevertheless turns aside to these things, is that picture, 
somewhere to the eastward of the old Nile, of a young 
man engaged in tending his father-in-law's sheep in the 
routine of a blazing Egyptian day. 

Suddenly this contemplative person, this reflective, 
if rather sullen, young man, saw a very curious thing — 
a bush that burned and was not consumed; that illu- 
minated even that sun-enveloped land, and particu- 
larly illuminated him. 

"And he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with 
fire and the bush was not consumed." 

Literature is just such a bush. But how few parents 
and how few teachers turn aside, though they are con- 
tinually passing. 

The relation of parent and child is a desperate thing, 
a thing compounded of tragedy. For, if parents them- 
selves had more to give, they would understand how 
little of literature, or of anything very refreshing and 



78 SHACKLED YOUTH 

invigorating and adventurous and joyful, the usual 
school has to give. 

Hence it follows that whole communities share an 
infatuation that their school is good for children simply 
because the children do not resent it. How should the 
children know that their school is a sterile thing, dom- 
inated by conscientious people, who, nevertheless, beat 
the ground to stone with their tramping about in *' cus- 
tom-made" pedagogical shoes? 

Here is a school with the children pouring in. You, 
being contemplative, realize that these children have 
just one chance like this. In a thousand hours a year, 
for a very few years, there is a chance that some few 
hours out of the total may be spent in the presence of 
that mysterious influence, that yeast, which will make 
the great pan of dough, called the public-school system, 
rise, and make the little pans of dough, the private 
schools, rise also. 

But the dough does not rise: it remains level with 
the society round about; and when the individual little 
loaves are baked in the oven of experience, the nation 
is not refreshed and invigorated as it might be had 
that bread "raised." Instead, there is general indi- 
gestion and a great cry for remedies. 

The teachers of literature, and especially the teach- 
ers in normal schools, do not realize that man, like the 
earth itself, is suspended upon nothing. That Shake- 
speare's assertion, "We are such stuff as dreams are 
made on," is rather an under-statement than an over- 
statement of the fact. That in a life wrapped in the 
seven veils of mystery, accompanied by prowling de- 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 79 

mons of pain, and always skirting an abyss, begun and 
terminated in vacuity and infinite silence, there are 
certain extremely precious sources of happiness and 
actual beatitude; and that they, for the majority of 
children, preside as wardens at these sources — as 
forest-rangers, to prevent devastation and the drying- 
up of the only springs that make the social world 
habitable. 

Aided by publishers and authors, by moving-picture 
producers and phonograph manufacturers, and mech- 
anicians of every sort whose impulses are exclusively 
economic and whose philosophy is the industrial one 
of quantity production, they, to a most incredible de- 
gree, proceed to throw into these springs, rubbish, the 
rubbish of their own wasteful and discouraged house- 
keeping, the old furniture of their tired heads, and 
the very mattresses of their heavy sleeping days. 

Let us take a look at the class in English. The 
teacher has been trained to teach English, and has 
taught it year after year. Even at the beginning of 
her career she was rather metallic, because the normal 
school she went to intensified her preconception that 
teaching English meant analyzing sentences, tossing 
their words into the air and catching them dexter- 
ously — just juggling English words. Nothing alive is 
ever exposed. She never takes a kicking pink-eyed 
rabbit out of anybody's pocket; she never discovers a 
vigorous emotion; because, as regards English, she has 
none herself — as the magician has his rabbit ; as a 
magician I saw last winter had a real lion, lean, tawny, 
and glaring, who for a few minutes turned his ''ruddy 



80 SHACKLED YOUTH 

eyes'* on an audience surfeited with tricks, and put the 
whole show to shame. If you have not a lion concealed 
about your person, dear teacher, have n't you at least 
a rabbit? 

As wave after wave of children's classes in English 
has broken against her, she has become quite stony. 
English is more and more words, and less and less 
emotion and passion and beauty and inspiration and 
love. Therefore, how can she possibly teach English? 
Moreover, the " Readers" do not help her, and outside 
the Readers she herself does not read much except 
newspapers. For the Readers are a tangle of short 
things, mediocre and good inextricably mixed. 

''The Class will please take their Readers and turn 
to page 43. John, what is the subject of the story on 
that page? 

"Now, stand up and read till I tell you to stop; 
stand up straight, please, and hold your book in your 
right hand. Speak clearly, hold your head up. There 
— that 's the first sentence; now tell us what mood the 
verb is in. What is the rule for the subjunctive mood? 
Can't anybody remember that? Why, we had it just 
day before yesterday. I will write it on the board ; for 
that is something you must know before you go on to 
the next grade." 

She writes: The subjunctive mood is used in a sub- 
ordinate proposition when both contingency and futurity 
are expressed, or when the contrary fact is implied. 

The children look at it somewhat as a puppy looks 
at the house cat with its back arched and tail inflated : 
they look at it reproachfully, and turn away sadly. 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 8i 

"Now, go on reading, please. 

''There, stop there. Caroline, what would you say- 
was the particular feature of this story as far as we 
have gone?" 

Caroline says, "Well, I should call it — sad — or — 
I don't know — I don't care much about it." 

"Oh, that's not what I mean," says the teacher; 
" I mean its literary feature. Don't you think it is the 
way the adjectives are used? Hugo had a great repu- 
tation in his day for adjectives. He seemed to know 
more of them than anybody else, and this is an excel- 
lent example of his style. 

"And don't you notice, too, how short his sentences 
are? Now, why did he use such short sentences? Why, 
every author has his style, and Hugo chose this as his 
because he liked it. I was always sorry he did, for it 
makes his writings so jerky. 

"Do you know anything else that Hugo wrote be- 
sides this piece we are reading?" 

Nobody knew, and there was every chance that no- 
body ever would know. They would always read pieces 
— rarely books, for they were trained to read pieces. 

Here is a scene to set against that. It is not a class 
in reading, or in anything to do with letters. It is just 
the sixth grade beginning its session with its teacher 
on the morning of any day. The children selected each 
day one of their number to recite some favorite poem ; 
or, just as often, they sang together some song they 
loved to sing. A boy with shaggy hair and the clothing 
of a poor man's son, but with a happy face devoid of 
self -consciousness, being called on by his classmates, 



82 SHACKLED YOUTH 

stood up at his chair, and recited in a pure, cadenced 
voice this thing, which I afterwards learned was a 
prayer of the Navajo Indians to the Mountain Spirit: 

Lord of the Mountain 
Reared within the Mountain, 
Young man, Chieftain, 
Hear a young man's prayer ! 
Hear a prayer for cleanness. 

Keeper of the strong rain. 

Drumming on the mountain; 

Lord of the small rain. 

That restores the earth in newness; 

Keeper of the clean rain, 

Hear a prayer for wholeness. 

Young man, Chieftain, 
Hear a prayer for fleetness. 
Keeper of the deer's way. 
Reared among the eagles, 
Clear my feet of slothness. 
Keeper of the paths of men. 
Hear a prayer for straightness. 
Hear a prayer for courage. 
Lord of the thin peaks. 
Reared among the thunders; 
Keeper of the head-lands. 
Holding up the harvest. 
Keeper of the strong rocks. 
Hear a prayer for staunchness. 

Young man, Chieftain, 
Spirit of the Mountain! 

How would you have felt if you had been there? 
In the midst of our general "mud and scum of 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 83 

things," in school and out, it was one of those poignant, 
unexpected songs that Emerson asks us to listen for — 
a penetrating and unforgettable song. 

And in the English classes of this school, what do 
they do? Why, they do what anybody would do who 
loved English literature and proposed to spread that 
feeling to children. 

They tell stories and they read books through. They 
read books through twice — just because children al- 
ways do that. The story moves on from day to day 
and from wonder to wonder. Will you substitute for 
this the indifferent hash of the Grade Reader, all 
chopped together and compressed between two covers, 
and then think that you will start any feeling for liter- 
ature, even if the teacher is good? Will you take a 
chapter out of ''The Wind in the Willows," or the 
''Lance of Kanana," or "Wolf the Storm-Leader," the 
"Travels of Ulysses," the " Nibelungenlied, " "Robin- 
son Crusoe," and miss the opportunity to give your 
children the whole experience? Why? 

Can you give any satisfactory reason why real books 
are not used in schools instead of Readers? And does 
it not seem better to read one book — if a fine one — 
than scraps from many books? 

Those who travel in or out of Chicago by rail may 
very likely be sitting among the glistening silver and 
china of the dining-car, with the red-shaded candles 
punctuating the comfortable room, in which the wait- 
ers are moving swiftly and adroitly along the aisle. 
Waiting for your order on this particularly dreary 
January evening, you look vaguely out of the window 



84 SHACKLED YOUTH 

on the very sea-bottom, the **ooze'* of civilization — 
the outskirts of an industrial city. And you look rather 
complacently. If you think about it at all, you think 
fatalistically. 

It is pleasant, on the whole, for the person in the 
radiant dining-car, awaiting the filet mignon^ to be a 
determinist, and to believe in status in accordance 
with function; to be feudalistic, and only agreeably 
conscious of the fact that multitudes are employed 
in supporting his weight and the weight of his house- 
hold and the weight of his ignorance and prejudice. 
It is a weight, and a leaden one; and the gazer through 
the plate-glass might with advantage think that there 
was danger, if too many engaged in his kind of think- 
ing and living, that the centre of gravity would get 
outside the base, and then, as usual, the thing would 
roll over and all sorts of hideous things come to view 
and to action. He might see the school, as he rolls 
ponderously by, black and ugly against the end of 
another day of routine, but with no thought of child- 
ren, with their eager eyes and hands and minds, who 
are having their total experience of childhood just 
there, in the stridency of those streets and rooms. 

But what has this to do with literature? Well, you 
saw those streets and houses, and you saw that school. 
But there were many things you could not see and 
had never seen, and among them was a woman who 
lives there. Not of your sort exactly, if you are really 
insulated by plate-glass, but of such a different sort 
that, in her presence, you, with your confident manner 
and modish garments, might stand quite confused and 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 85 

abashed, and rather afraid to expose that well-worn 
stock of ideas, the stock you so volubly exchange with 
your intimates. 

She is a star in the twilight of Chicago*s industrial 
abasement, that "washes the dusk with silver." And 
in the glare of electricity and the roar of traffic and 
the mad outcries of our Babylon, she is unconfused 
and radiant. 

She is going into the school after its educational 
machinery has stopped humming, and appears in the 
assembly hall, which presently begins to fill with child- 
ren, the older ones a little sheepish, and many boys 
frankly inimical and explosive, hitting each other 
with their caps, and full of vacuous antics by which 
they would indicate their superiority to these extra 
proceedings, but, nevertheless, drawn by an obscure 
curiosity. 

They see the small figure standing near the desk, 
and conclude that this meeting for " story- telling " will 
be theirs rather than hers, and concentrate at the back. 

The room seethes and tosses, filled with that strange 
protoplasmic substance which we call youth. 

But notice : this woman steps to the centre, — on 
the floor, not on the platform, — and you see there 
that ancient and most moving thing, the field and the 
sower, the lamps and the lighter, the listeners and the 
speaker, confronting one another. It is a situation 
charged with an enormous potential, with a voltage 
of which physics knows nothing, but which, in its 
department called psychology, or science of the soul, 
rises to levels where, if what is said is not commen- 



86 SHACKLED YOUTH 

surate and adequate, you are thrown down by the 
recoil into an abyss of defeat and despair. 

This is the matrix of education: that this relation- 
ship, this confronting of an illuminative personality 
by combustible material, shall result in a lighting of 
those lamps in the mind and in the heart that shall 
eventually show the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 

And this is the tragedy of the school : that the lamps 
remain unlighted, and the oil evaporates, — that price- 
less oil of childhood, — and the opportunity passes. 

There is a picture called Oral Tradition, painted on 
one of the walls of the Congressional Library. It repre- 
sents a group of Bedouins, in white robes and turbans, 
squatted in a circle of gleaming eyes, while before 
them stands a dramatic figure recounting in glowing 
Arabic some old tale of the desert, or the chanted 
poetry of Abu Nuwas of Harun. 

The spirit of man has never changed ; living speech 
rather than the printed page is still, and will always 
be, its avatar, its quickener, and its passionate hunger. 

In similar attitude stands the story-teller in the city 
school, and puts the same resistless spell upon the 
audience. She is in the apostolic succession from the 
story-tellers of the prehistoric desert, the skalds of 
the North, and the myth-makers of the Mediterranean. 

The boys at the back of the room are reduced to 
graven images, with straining eyes and ears, all en- 
meshed in that finely woven fabric called — Literature. 

Children, to be strong, to be symmetrical, and to 
be properly coordinated, must repeat in their physical 
growth the whole biologic story. 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 87 

And something of the same sort applies to their 
minds. That is one of the natural laws in the spiritual 
world. Therefore, the literary diet for children is com- 
posed of fairy stories, fables, myths, and folk- tales, 
the older the better, because these have been tested by 
the attrition of hundreds of years and have never worn 
out. They are like radium, forever giving out energy, 
but never weighing less or diminishing in force. And 
the avidity with which they are accepted, their com- 
plete assimilation, makes it perfectly plain that they 
are as native a diet for children as clover for rabbits. 
They make bone and sinew, blood and nerve, and are 
the only soil in which the roots of their mature life can 
always find moisture away down under the parched 
ground of the work-a-day world. 

When you proceed to substitute for these highly 
nutritive things the feverish stupidity of the standard 
moving-picture shows, censored or not, and the defile- 
ments of the sensational theatres, you proceed to de- 
stroy souls. All the green shoots of imagination, from 
which alone have ever come any harvests of creative 
ability, are ironed out and scorched. For older people 
they may be tolerated, as a moral equivalent, perhaps, 
for the saloon. For children they are, to use Mr. 
Wister's phrase, a pentecost of calamity. 

But here we are. We have not provided against this 
pestilence, which now flieth by night and wasteth at 
noonday, any powerful antidote or preventive such 
as this story-teller, except in rare instances, like this. 

Here in this room are Greek children, Italian child- 
ren, Scandinavian, Russian; some of German, Irish, 



88 SHACKLED YOUTH 

and American parentage — but they are in the minor- 
ity. The stories are taken from the sources of their 
native literature. On this day it was Greek — of Ulys- 
ses and the Cyclops, Ulysses and Circe. On another 
day, it would be of Balder, of Sigurd, or of Frithiof ; 
legends of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Bruce; folk- tales 
of Ireland and of Germany; or such a story as Tolstoi's 
*' Where Love is, There God is also." 

In simple words, deliberately spoken, with but a 
slight gesture, but with an intense timbre and the 
rhythm, intonation, and inflection required by each 
situation, the story-teller proceeds along this old 
Roman road, accompanied by the winged spirits of 
these children, and at the end says: — 

'* Next week I hope to meet you here again; and will 
you keep the engagement?" 

With hardly breath for answer, they continue to 
sit there, and with that sudden inspiration, born of 
the maternal, the story-teller continues : — 

"Now I must say good-night, and I want to say it 
by repeating a little poem to you. Is n't it strange what 
can be done with words? and a great poet is a person 
who can do more wonderful things with words than 
anybody else. He puts them together in a certain way, 
and they immediately glow and make a great light and 
a great music all about them ; and yet they are so old 
and worn with use. They come from so far back, away 
back in the old Europe your grandfathers and grand- 
mothers lived in, and their grandfathers and their 
grandmothers. Nevertheless, they are young and 
strong, filled with such thunders and whispers, such 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 89 

sweetness and bitterness. Dear children, when you 
look at things, and think and write about things, 
keep perfectly quiet and wait till the right words 
come swimming by, then catch them in your net like 
silver fish. Keep quiet and wait, and presently here 
they come swimming through the clear pool of your 
mind — all living, shining words that you can catch. 
"And now listen to the words William Blake caught 
in his net. I will tell you more about him some day, 
and read you some of the poems he calls 'Songs of 
Innocence.* Such astonishing things — things that 
could be written only by a very great man, and yet a 
man who was as simple in his use of words as a little 
child. But these are the words he used when he wanted 
to express what was in his heart as he looked at the 
evening star — and this is my * good-night.' " And she 
repeated very slowly: — 

"Thou fair-haired Angel of the Evening, 
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light 
Thy bright torch of love, thy radiant crown 
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed. 
Smile on our loves, and while thou drawest the 
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew 
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes in timely sleep. 
Let thy west wind sleep on 
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes 
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon, 
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide, 
And then the lion glares through the dim forest. 
The fleeces of our flocks are covered with 
Thy sacred dew; protect them with thine influence." 



90 SHACKLED YOUTH 

And so her flock departed home, their fleeces covered 
with a sacred dew, and in their hearts some glimmering 
of the stars in the great constellation of letters. 

There must be people found who can do this sort of 
thing, this oral tradition ; otherwise, literature in school 
has no roots and cannot grow. And these people exist. 
Put a sufficient premium on this sort of school meeting, 
at morning exercise or any convenient time, and from 
the recesses of our huge American family, the story- 
tellers, draped in garments of quiet power, and of fault- 
less discrimination, will stand before you. 

Why should it be necessary to state this case again? 
Do we people, who profess all sorts of devotion to the 
needs of children in school and out, read a great author- 
ity on this subject, whose works have been available 
for years — G. Stanley Hall? Articles in magazines can 
be but faint echoes of the things he has said in his great 
books, "Adolescence" and "Education." 

To this old man we make our obeisance and our 
apologies. 

And then, too, I am only telling something that every 
enlightened mother knows, though she may not un- 
derstand to what an extent, in this as in so many other 
ways, she is building a craft — a canoe — for her son 
or her daughter who listens at bedtime to her stories ; 
a craft that will bring him through many a rapid, if 
not dry, at least safe, by the subtle steering of a thing 
called "taste." 

Children of Presbyterian households a generation ago 
may have felt the rigors and confinements of a child- 
hood spent "in the fear and admonition of the Lord." 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 91 

But there were many compensations, and among them 
was this. Out of the austerities of the Westminster 
Shorter Catechism, and theological sermons, and in- 
terminable extempore prayers, and strange melancholy 
hymns, emerged those astonishing pictures of men 
and events called ** Bible Stories" — from the Morn- 
ing and the Evening of the First Day, down through 
the wonderful procession of figures passing colossal 
against the glowing sky, on the rim of that Oriental 
world from whence came the very breath of our spir- 
itual life. 

In after years they tower up and constitute a sort 
of mountain-range running across the green plains of 
early youth. And you never get out of sight of them ; 
they tower higher as you go on. Children who have 
not appropriated these stories as integral parts of their 
lives are likely to suffer from the lack of that luminous 
and stately background, which I compare with a moun- 
tain-range, and behind which, as we proceed inland, is 
the immortal sea that brought us hither. 

For those who, in the multiplicity of their material, 
may have overlooked these peaks where the greatest 
river of literature has its source, allow me to recall a 
very few, at haphazard. 

Esau, for instance — Esau the brown and shaggy 
hunter, with his great hairy hands, his honest eyes and 
appetite, home from a long sojourn in that wilderness 
he loves, throws himself down in the door of the tent, 
talks with Jacob, and makes that memorable bargain 
symbolic of the relationship that forever exists between 
the man of physical endowment and simplicity — the 



92 SHACKLED YOUTH 

outdoor man — and the man of mental subtlety — the 
indoor man. 

Samson, the Playboy of the Eastern World, his 
broad, whimsical face framed in that astonishing hair, 
filled with grim humors which could change to devas- 
tating rage. A piece of the old earth itself, against 
whom a lion roared but once, and then with terror. A 
man of riddles and taciturn mirth, wandering quizzi- 
cally through an amazed and unfriendly country. Ty- 
ing together the tails of foxes, carrying off the gates 
of walled towns, like a huge undergraduate, and with 
the jaw-bone of an ass, picked from his mother-earth, 
reducing his pursuers to pulp. But a prey to the guile 
of bright eyes, as always; until, finally, he sits blind 
and shorn among the women, grinding, grinding, with 
his pestle and mortar. Nevertheless, a quiescent, not 
an extinct volcano, as they shall presently know. 

Noah, massively calm, like a bronze man, with his 
elemental sons and daughters-in-law. A family the 
Creator of the Earth found worthy to live in it ; not a 
huckster, but a builder. A slow but sure man, with 
the dignity of six hundred years of experience, who 
could do huge things with an axe and an adze and a 
mallet, and did them, he and his sons. And behold the 
Ark of gopher- wood, its cavernous interior resounding 
with the cries of every kind of beast, bird, and creeping 
thing, and redolent of the same, as the gang-plank was 
drawn in, the fountains of the great deep were broken 
up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 

Lot, in his doomed little city, through the dim streets 
of which those radiant strangers passed swiftly to his 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 93 

door. Two such prosperous little cities, — Sodom and 
Gomorrah, — and so comfortable in the fertile plain. 
But not enough disinterested men in them; and the 
sense of appalling disaster hangs over, as Lot and his 
family flee through the gates toward the hill country. 
And there his wife stands to this day, looking back! 
O incomparable masculine retribution on all the femi- 
nine longing for the old home rather than for the fron- 
tier! Outside of how many little cities are there these 
pillars of salt! 

Joseph and his brethren — and the strange dreams 
of those Egyptians, which he could interpret. Joseph 
the administrator and friend of Pharaoh in the old, 
old land of Egypt, to which his descendants would 
return as slaves. 

Moses and Aaron, and those heart-breaking plagues 
which the dark wizards down there could also produce, 
strangely enough, because Egyptian learning was pro- 
found and went down into the recesses of things. Even 
the Jehovah of Moses felt the prick of competition, 
and was obliged to do quite stupendous things to out- 
match these doctors of Egyptian divinity. 

Saul, Jonathan, and David, that tragic group, wor- 
thy of Michael Angelo or Rodin — bound together by 
the strangest fate. 

David, standing on the edge of the army and looking 
with his clear poet's eyes at that apparition Goliath; 
filled with a curious conviction that he can stop this 
outrageous affront — the conviction of a boy who was 
also a king. 

David and his descent to the depths of criminal in- 



94 SHACKLED YOUTH 

dulgence and despair, and his ascent to the sublimity of 
the scene above the city gate after Absalom was slain ; 
and the immortal music of the Twenty- third Psalm. 

Solomon the incomparable, having entertained the 
Queen of Sheba in a manner that bewildered even that 
consummate artist in pageantry, and having got his 
huge family to bed, paces wearily to his apartments, 
removes his insignia, and after looking on the vast 
Oriental night and its incredible stars, writes — let us 
imagine — the last few chapters of a little book he has 
recently been devoting his precious leisure to, long 
ascribed to him and now called '' Ecclesiastes " ; under- 
standing so well that heaven and earth might pass 
away, but the words of those chapters would not ; that 
the spectacle of kings and queens and palaces and 
parades was the least real of all things. ''Solomon who 
talked to a butterfly as a man talks to a man." 

Job, and the eloquence of those mighty debaters, 
where again Jehovah can win only by employing his 
greatest guns against this Promethean stubbornness. 

Daniel, and the feast of Belshazzar. There was a 
great teacher in prototype, whose business it was to 
tell the truth about things, and who recognized the 
signs of the times and interpreted them. "Let thy 
gifts be to thyself," he said, ''and give thy rewards to 
another." What writing would such a man see on the 
walls of our cities? And what would be his interpreta- 
tion? For in these cities is all the sowing that produces 
the whirlwind of war. "Smartly attired, countenance 
smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, 
hell under the skull-bones." 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 95 

It is a stupendous piece of theatrical art, that setting, 
filled with wild a music too, increasing to the aban- 
donment of the "Scheherazada," which suddenly 
quavers, dies out; and in shuddering silence the fingers 
of a man's hand — huge cyclopean fingers — are seen 
writing on the great gold wall, over against the candle- 
stick. 

Ruth and Naomi. Women of a deathless majesty 
and loveliness, whose speech is the speech of that in- 
ward nobility which is the crown and diadem of life. 
"Entreat me not to leave thee or to depart from fol- 
lowing after thee." And as long as English is spoken, 
we have the final expression of devotion in these and 
the following words. 

And so on, down to the crowning achievement of 
the compulsion man is under to adorn his life with 
beauty and escape the terrors of a mechanistic world — ■ 
the story of Bethlehem. 

Again out of heaven come visitors and a message, 
as recounted so often before by the poets of all nations 
in their own idioms, but never before in any spectacle 
or any words so transcendent and compelling as these. 

Before those obscure men of the Orient, and their 
successive translators, down to that amazing assembly 
of men of letters who produced the King James version, 
all writers and teachers may well prostrate themselves; 
nothing so beautiful, so august, so comforting, having 
been produced before or since by man on this planet. 

If you have regard for your child destined to wander 
in the mazes of the labyrinths that are now constructed 
to the consternation and ultimate destruction of youth, 



96 SHACKLED YOUTH 

you give him a thread to hold, so that he cannot lose 
his way and may even kill the Beast that fills the air 
with its bellowing. At any rate, if we do not feed him, 
he will die of starvation. And until the monster is 
dead, and the labyrinth transformed into something 
generally happier and more healthy, the supreme duty 
of parents and teachers is to attach childrens' hearts to 
the threads of great literature and great music and 
great ideas, while there is still time. 

It is just as important that the school music should 
be inspiring, and should capture the rapturous atten- 
tion of every child, as that the school literature should; 
and the means to secure this result are the same — find 
the person who corresponds to the story-teller, care- 
fully avoiding imitations and tempting compromises. 
For it is much better to have none at all than to have 
something specious; than to have something second- 
class that poses as first-class ; than to fool children in 
such an insidious and despicable way that they will 
never get any confidence in their own discrimination, 
but will forever mix good, bad, and indifferent, all the 
time perfectly bewildered, but making believe that 
they know, just as their parents do. 

From the twelve intellectual supermen in the world 
who can understand the Einstein theory, we are going 
to steal one little trinket, and stop right there. They 
have a thing called a ' ' frame of reference." In an effort 
over many years to find that irov o-ro), — "a place to 
stand," which Archimedes also wanted very much, — 
a place from which they could measure motion with 
some confidence, — they hitched this frame of refer- 



LITERATURE IN THE GRADES 97 

ence to first one thing and then another, until they got 
as far off as the Nebulae, entirely outside our fixed 
stars and everything else that seemed fixed. Nothing 
would do, — nothing was fixed, — everything moved, 
and moved with shattering velocity. Trustworthy 
measurements could not possibly be made. At last 
they took the ether; took it on faith, because they don't 
know whether there is such a thing or not, but they had 
no further choice. 

Where are you going to hang your frame of reference 
in the ethical universe — and the spiritual? What 
shall we tie to as a base for measuring the actual ex- 
cellence of ideas, of aspirations, of procedures, of the 
works and words of men? How far back do you think 
we should go to escape the aberrations of popular opin- 
ion to-day: current events, journalism, class- theories, 
religious cults, capital propaganda and labor propa- 
ganda, pedagogy, diplomacy, patriotism? 

There is need for some haste in making this decision 
for our children. For ourselves it makes comparatively 
little difference. It is what we commit them to that is 
the disturbing thing. 

There is an old pontifical rubric, ''Unto you are 
committed the keys; whomsoever thou shalt bind 
shall remain bounds 

If this sounds pedantic, moralistic, and reactionary, 
let the objector suggest, as regards literary and artistic 
standards, something more in keeping with the actual 
needs of twentieth-century children. 

The fact seems to be that the total structure of the 
best and deepest in human experience and thought. 



98 SHACKLED YOUTH 

and therefore in literary expression, is not only old, but 
very beneficially secure. 

Perhaps those who recognized the writer of "These 
Wild Young People" in the September "Atlantic 
Monthly" as their spokesman will feel this point of 
view as an added hardship in their vivid rush toward 
the privileges of youth. But when they arrive at this 
stronghold, as at others equally secure, they will save 
themselves some embarrassment if they recall that 
picture of Thor before the gates of Jotunheim. He 
also was exasperated, and hammered somewhat on the 
heaven-high gates, demanding surrender, or, at any 
rate, demanding consideration much beyond his worth. 

But it particularly remains for school people to show 
that they fully understand what schools are for — and 
then proceed to put the emphasis upon those things 
that are radical; that pertain to the roots of human 
happiness and health and fertility; that produce an 
enlightened heart and a right spirit within us, to guide 
a trained mind and hand. 

By the magic of intimate friendly intercourse with a 
wise and sympathetic teacher, who can interpret life 
and its arts to his pupils, who long ago accepted Whit- 
man's philosophy and asks not good fortune, because 
he has good fortune within himself and distributes it 
wherever he goes, you get a school; and by no other 
means or method whatsoever. 

For a school, said a great teacher the other day in 
my hearing, has always been just a person — is now, 
and ever shall be; substitutes are invariably futile. 



VII 
NATURAL HISTORY 

" Man born of the dust of the Earth does not forget 
his origin," says Emerson; but he refers to the auto- 
matic memory, not the conscious memory ; and what 
I should like to offer as a suggestion to teachers of 
Natural History is the necessity of connecting child- 
ren consciously with nature, and frankly, and indeed 
rapturously, renewing a kinship which can result only 
in increased happiness and strength. 

Have you ever seen that little piece of carved marble 
in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, called ''The 
Hand of God," carved by a man named Rodin? In the 
hollow of that febrile hand — that hand of the great 
Artisan and Artist — lies curled the human figure, as 
in an open nest. 

The hand of God in which we nestle is this planet, 
and his body is the stellar universe; and to be conscious 
of this fact, — to have a proper reverence for this 
relationship and therefore a happy acquiescence in 
the laws, the commandments, of this God, — this is the 
beginning of wisdom. Behind this outward expression 
of God you can have whatever inward expression your 
nature demands ; and most of us require a personal ex- 
pression to comfort us on our way and to assure us of 
some welcome at the end of our journey. But all I 
want to talk about here is the outward expression. 

To what an extent children are a part of natural 
history they rarely discover. In fact, it has been 



100 SHACKLED YOUTH 

considered a part of respectability that they should not 
discover it at all, but should always look the other way 
and in confusion and aversion deny any interest in the 
matter. On that obliquity nature inflicts the logical 
punishment. Children uninformed of their origin and 
the processes by which they appeared above the surface, 
like mushrooms, from the mat of raw life that spreads 
through and under the earth, grow up with deformed 
minds, crippled by lack of sunlight, by living in cellars ; 
and presently this debases the body. 

We are just now beginning to break through the 
crust of this unnatural reticence, and even at meetings 
of parents and teachers, men and women, you may 
hear the Natural History of children very frankly dis- 
cussed ; and in classes in the Grades, the whole secret 
is disclosed, and the children are led out of the cellars 
and cisterns and closets where their parents confined 
them because those parents were oppressed by this 
curious sense of shame in the presence of Mother Na- 
ture standing quite naked beside them. 

And so the very first thing to say about Natural 
Science is this: the teacher of that subject must relate 
her pupils to it biologically. When she has done that, 
then she naturally interests them in every aspect of life. 

It all begins by looking and listening, and does not 
at all begin by the way of books, or by anything at all 
indoors, if you can help it. If you can't help it, you 
produce as much outdoor illusion indoors as you can, 
by the use of stuffed or live birds and animals, plants, 
toads, snakes, fossils, sections of trees, beehives, aqua- 
riums, ant-nests, cocoons, and so on. 



NATURAL HISTORY loi 

You must have a room of ample size and proper 
equipment and lighting; a real menagerie; a room 
which, by its generous and sympathetic appointments, 
clearly indicates that the subject is appreciated and is 
not a mere accessory, tacked onto a great mass of 
book-routine for the sake of variety and relaxation. 

Is there any subject in any school as important as 
this subject of origins and of relationships, and is there 
anything more native to children and more greedily 
devoured? Will you take full advantage of this passion 
for life and every sort of living thing, or will you take 
partial advantage of it? 

Will you, whoever you are, responsible for building 
buildings and employing teachers and arranging cur- 
ricula, go on turning out graduates who give not one 
thought to these huge or minute mysteries which they 
pass by hourly, and who grow up into those unfortu- 
nate inhabitants of the earth who might just as well 
have lived underground, who never see anything 
except ''goods," food, parades — or hear anything 
except the voices of Babel? 

Have you ever gone into the country with one of 
these impoverished souls and observed him walk or 
ride past and through miles of landscape, talking a con- 
tinuous stream about books or business, seeing nothing 
and hearing nothing? And every minute things are 
happening around him that make his presence a pro- 
fanation and a brazen intrusion. You avoid producing 
this kind of caricature, this mutilated creature, if you 
get children to go with a Natural-History teacher who, 
like Solomon, talks to the butterflies when he takes his 



102 SHACKLED YOUTH 

walks abroad ; who is on intimate terms with bugs and 
snakes and birds, the furred and feathered brothers 
and sisters of a common family — a teacher who ini- 
tiates them into the great Temple of Silence. Once 
you sit perfectly still for a long- enough time to be ac- 
cepted as part of the earth, and quit the incessant talk 
and movement of the usual visitor to the country, 
things begin to happen around you, and you begin to 
see and to hear. Keep that up, and eyes and ears 
carry more and more amazing and beautiful messages 
to the brain. Old man Fabre watches his Sphex Wasp, 
his Bombex, his Banded Epeira, or his Scarib, and by 
the power of silence, by forgetting himself and becom- 
ing a mere eye, reaches the very nerve-centres of life, 
and sees there things that confound all human intelli- 
gence, things that proceed with such precision, with 
such fearful assiduity, with such atrocious relentless- 
ness, that it is easy to understand the necessity of 
religion, of music, of anything that breaks the connec- 
tion with a mechanistic horror like this. 

By the power of silence, the listening ear and the 
seeing eye, you open a door into another world of life, 
and, slipping through, become part of the primitive 
and predatory machine, grinding on through millions 
of years — beautiful, but very terrible and wholly 
inscrutable. 

Shall we take children a little way into that en- 
chanted country, so that they may thereafter in a new 
sense and vastly greater degree "glorify God and enjoy 
him forever," as the Catechism puts it? Or shall we 
make a mere pretense of it, a silly gesture toward this 



NATURAL HISTORY 103 

enormous thing, and then pass by to the arithmetic 
and history and other classes, and get ready for high 
school and college, by sharpening ''the tools of learn- 
ing," as they call them, by means of which you may 
quarry a living out of the mine of human society, but 
remain permanently blind and deaf to a much larger 
society, and one which can contribute to your hap- 
piness by taking you outside of yourself into a larger 
and quieter place undisturbed by prejudice, pride, or 
precept? 

It is your lot, as it is mine, to have opportunities to 
talk to many different sorts of people whom you have 
known for a long time, and who make up your general 
"acquaintance," as it is called. 

They may range from very crafty and underground 
folks up to very distinguished and able gentlemen of 
the highest integrity — from labor delegates to the 
presidents of railroads ; from foremen in machine-shops 
to general managers of industrial plants and depart- 
ment stores. 

In addition to all these, there is the usual range that 
everybody has in his own social group, fading off into 
acquaintances, or, perhaps, if one is fortunate, friends 
in other groups contiguous. 

These people are engaged in doing the work of the 
world. They are the sons of that Martha who was 
troubled about many things. Their interest in life is 
very closely connected with their usefulness in life, 
with their professional careers. 

In order to arrive at the degree of distinction they 



104 SHACKLED YOUTH 

enjoy, there has seemed to them to be no time for 
anything except such things as contributed directly 
or indirectly to the business in hand. Theirs was 
not a divided mind, an uncertain allegiance. Tempera- 
mentally they did not resent the constrictions and 
limitations and provincialisms of their guild. They 
joined all the lodges and societies, and accepted greed- 
ily all the illusions in the terminology of the Free- 
mason. 

It is not that these people consciously scorn delights 
and elect to live laborious days. By no means. Their 
pleasures mean a great deal to them, even if they take 
them rather sadly. What they are bitten with is a 
thing one might call regimentation. They have sur- 
rendered rather easily to the folks who are engaged in 
running the machinery of human affairs — a huge and 
increasingly cumbersome thing, a perfect mass of com- 
plications and frictions, of creaks and groans and in- 
ternal explosions. A thing impossible to keep going at 
all without armies of mechanics and mechanics' assist- 
ants. And a man like Spurrell in his fascinating book, 
" Modern Man and His Forerunners," goes a long way 
to prove that, as a result of these complications and 
gyratory antics, the necessity of immense skill and in- 
dustry in making repairs has about passed the limit of 
human ability, and sooner or later, as in Babylon and 
Rome, the clanking monstrosity disintegrates. 

Here and there you find a man or a woman sitting 
by the road watching this circus wagon go by, very 
much interested but very much detached ; or lying, as 
Stevenson somewhere says, asleep in the shade, with a 



NATURAL HISTORY 105 

handkerchief over his face, and a book and glass at his 
elbow. 

Society does not love these outsiders: it hates them. 
Its only applause for a man is when he is seen run- 
ning, like a tired dog, under a vehicle called a ''career," 
with his tongue out and his eyes blinded by the hot 
dust of the road, and so fatigued, that, during any in- 
tervals of the journey, eating and sleeping, marrying 
and giving in marriage, are the only occupations im- 
portant enough to justify attention, and these taken 
on the gallop. 

The career lands him eventually in oblivion, but he 
has done the proper thing; and what has he got to show 
for it? As far as business is concerned, this statement 
of Dr. Johnson's seemed to answer at the time: "It is 
as harmless an occupation, sir, as the people engaged 
in it can be trusted to employ their time with." 

But one must question that now. Business seems to 
hatch out myriads of nasty little war-dogs, because it 
sits on the eggs of bitterness, of antipathy, of greed, of 
pride, of boasting, of insolence, and of insularity. One 
of these curs gets kicked by somebody in another 
nation — no doubt most deservedly kicked — and im- 
mediately the pack must be loosed; there are drums 
and tramplings, and the war is on. 

This is not meant to be a blanket indictment. By 
no means. There are all sorts of exceptions. And there 
are careers, too, which are not driven by the brute who 
answers most readily to the name "Respectability," 
but by the soul of the man himself, seated in the wagon, 
or, better, running ahead of it like a link-boy, with a 



io6 SHACKLED YOUTH 

torch in his hand, and full of songs and laughter from 
sheer exuberance of, and enchantment with, life. 

Now these acquaintances of yours and mine, with 
dull ears and opaque eyes, and with so little time any- 
how to investigate anything in fields off the dusty road 
where lying billboards produce a vulgarity actually ob- 
scene — these people did not choose this life. Neither 
did the people who are so over-burdened with the phys- 
ical work of life, with shoveling coal, or baking bread, 
or dusting and sweeping, that they have no energy left 
over, choose their lives. They are merely unfortunate 
in this respect, namely, that nobody in childhood, 
either in school or in family, laid a gentle hand on their 
impetuosity and said , ' ' Listen ! Look ! ' ' 

They never met anybody the least resembling old 
Muir or John Burroughs. They never read their books, 
or any books like them. They never joined, even for a 
day, the company of those to whom no paradise is 
closed, — 

Who foot by branching root and stem, 

And lightly with the woodland share the change of night and day. 

John Lubbock's book on "Ants, Bees and Wasps" was 
totally unknown to them, as Fabre's books are now. 
There used to be a feeling about having extraneous 
interests such as these, which demanded apologies, or 
concealments, if you were to be considered a serious 
and dependable person. It was a piece of that deplor- 
able Puritanism which has fortunately faded in pro- 
portion as man has adopted a more comfortable habit 
of speech and conduct, less dominated by the doctrine 



NATURAL HISTORY 107 

of "calling and election.'* It is understood now that a 
man may be a better minister, a better lawyer, or a 
better doctor, if the asperities of these tasks are hu- 
manized and annotated and alleviated by what would 
formerly have been scorned as idleness. And if that is 
true of the professions, which have in their practice so 
many vital contacts with life, how much more is it true 
of industrial and commercial people, who become 
metallic and mechanistic, and look out of very small 
windows onto very sordid scenes. 

We are all one piece of a thing called life. And noth- 
ing is more normal or more desirable or more fascinat- 
ing than that we should get the sense of kinship and 
communion with the life that both was and is us^ and 
by that means be made whole — wholesome — again, 
as we were in childhood. 

It is a miracle if an adult, by dipping in this Beth- 
saida, can be cured of his infirmities. But children 
come to these interests with a passion that makes -it 
perfectly plain that their instinct, their scent, is unaf- 
fected by the anise-seed and turpentine trails of human 
affairs, which are laid by the crafty scholastic. What 
they crave is this one thing. It is the subject in which 
they can completely absorb themselves. Their life 
flows with all this life around them, and these creatures 
are intensely fellow creatures. 

And yet what do the schools offer to appease this 
cosmic appetite, this hunger for a close association 
with a life they can love, so different from your sad 
substitutes, your adult grimness and impersonation of 
Moses, if not of God? 



io8 SHACKLED YOUTH 

Why make a list of stuffed animals, of a possible 
wretched turtle, of some desiccated birds, presided 
over by a teacher of natural science, who, whatever he 
may do, certainly does not do the only thing there is to 
do, namely, open the door into that enchanted land 
where children come into their own estate — an estate 
which remains theirs thereafter, until the deafness and 
blindness of extreme old age softly close the door again 
but leave memories of days and nights ambrosiance ? 

The test is just this — do children, as a whole, show 
any signs whatever of having been awakened in school 
to the rapture and the intoxicating interests inherent 
in this subject? They do not. They do not even show 
such signs immediately after they finish school, — 
while they are yet very young, — to say nothing of the 
later time, when the dogs of civilization are baying on 
the trail of every hunted individual. 

And as an investment for old age, what else is there? 
"What is left?" somebody asked old Walt, sitting in 
his little house at Camden, all that wonderful robus- 
ticity and exuberance exchanged for a feeble shuffle 
along the roadsides in good weather. 

"Nature is left," he said; "that's all, but that's 
enough." 

And you know and I know that that is so. That is 
the main thing that is left, and it is a stupendous thing 
to have invested in that security. Think of the people 
who have n't it: old people — old people parading yet 
the terrible rags of pretense, or old people condemned 
to city streets, to theatres and operas. Compare them 
to other old people waiting for the spring again, in 



NATURAL HISTORY 109 

whom the sap of a remote youth still runs up with the 
aspiration of green shoots, and to whom the song spar- 
row and crocus in March come with a promise more 
real and more beautiful and compelling than any 
cathedral Easter service. And after that their year 
unfolds in the old lovely way — day after day uttering 
speech, night after night showing knowledge. 

What shall we do with Natural History in schools? 
It is a harsh mockery, an affront, and an abominable 
deception. It is a tragedy. There goes the child out of 
school, fourteen years old, eighteen years old, with 
ears that cannot hear and eyes that cannot see, while 
the gorgeous pageant of creation passes him by, and 
nobody ever came to him where he sat at his desk and 
said: **You are spending too much time here. This 
school is only a part, and a small part, of your prepara- 
tion for life. The rest of it is out of doors with me: 
on the hills, along the rivers; in winter with the Indian 
trapper, in summer with the Gloucester fishermen, in 
spring with the sap-boilers, in fall with the harvesters; 
and always with the fur- and feather-folk and with 
gentle domestic animals who will instruct you in a rea- 
sonable life." 

How many teachers of Natural History are there 
who can set fire to their pupils, so that the drenching 
of routine in school and out can never put that fire out, 
and by it they may warm themselves to their last day? 



VIII 

ASTRONOMY 

A DEALER in astronomical charts was in the superin- 
tendent's office when I went in, with all sorts of maps 
and diagrams to hang on the wall, and also machines 
for showing the rotation of the planets. 

^*I am afraid these things are too expensive for us," 
said the superintendent; "our appropriation is small 
and the textbooks use most of it up. I would like you 
to meet the gentleman who teaches astronomy, how- 
ever, and talk things over with him." 

So the astronomy teacher came up — a man with a 
gray beard and glasses and very bright eyes, quite as 
an astronomer should be; a small man and keen — 
sparkling like a bit of night air in December. Indeed, 
a man exactly for the r51e. And so I was not a bit 
surprised when he said in his crisp, concise way, *'I 
don't want these things; I really don't want them. The 
children have made most all of them themselves, even 
the rotation machine. But I '11 tell you what I do want 
— I want a telescope, a big one. How many schools 
have telescopes?" 

*'We sell very few telescopes," said the salesman. 
*'They are expensive, even the small ones, and they 
are not demanded." 

" Now why is that? Why don't you make it plain to 
school-boards that telescopes are necessary and that 
every school should have one? 

**If I were selling things for astronomy teachers I 



ASTRONOMY iii 

would first of all sell a telescope. Why? Why, because 
what you want is interest in the subject, is n't it? 
You want pupils to look at real stars — not pictures of 
stars. 

"How many children have ever seen the moons of 
Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn, or the mountains on the 
Moon, or the canals on Mars, or double stars, or neb- 
ulas? How many teachers lie on their backs with their 
classes on clear nights, and get the names of constella- 
tions? 

** What children need to see are stars, not books and 
machines. Now you work up that gospel with your 
customers, and you will do some good. 

"The trouble with us inhabitants of the Earth is 
that we don't see off it enough. We ride around on it 
for sixty years or so, — we actually ride on the outside 
of it, — and we might as well have been shut up inside. 

"I say we ride on the outside of it. Do you realize 
what that means? It means that we are continually 
engaged in the most extravagant piece of experience. 
We are on a vehicle touring through black space, 
black and bottomless and topless, cold beyond imagi- 
nation. We are wrapped in a blanket of warmth, and 
can look at the passing scenery with comfort enough 
to make looking a luxury rather than a hardship. 

"And yet we don't look. We are engaged instead in 
burying our heads in the sand of a desert called * busi- 
ness' or 'society,' — anything you want to call it, — 
with the most infatuated notion that these are the 
important things in our lives. 

"Now what's the use in talking to you this way?" 



112 SHACKLED YOUTH 

said the little astronomy man. "But see here, if you 
want to introduce a little originality into your selling 
business and do children a good turn, talk up tele- 
scopes. Good-bye. Sell one to our folks if you can, for 
I '11 tell you I 'm tired of apologizing to these fine little 
children for our stupidity in having nothing but pic- 
tures and diagrams to show them." 

"Well," said the salesman, "he's nutty on tele- 
scopes, what? You know there is n't a school-board 
that would think of putting up the price for a decent 
one — about two thousand dollars for the cheapest. 
What do they care about stars?" 

"Quite true," replied the superintendent; "but I 
have an idea I can get that money by private subscrip- 
tion and I 'm going to try. I never thought of it before, 
but our man here is quite right. Send me a catalogue of 
telescopes when you get back, will you?" 

The superintendent gets a telescope. He does actu- 
ally discover a few people who can understand that 
there is something wholly discreditable and shameful 
in the fact that they can always buy an automobile, or 
join an expensive golf club, or pay the fare to Cali- 
fornia and back, but are inclined to be very grim and 
ugly about giving to schools more than they have to in 
taxes or tuition. 

Of course, even these few have very sincere doubts 
about looking at stars as an important part of a school 
curriculum. It does seem quite outside anything that 
can have a remote influence on life and conduct. 

But the astronomy man talks to them and this is 
what he says : — 



ASTRONOMY 113 

"You are wondering, I understand, why I think we 
ought to spend money for a telescope — a thing which 
will enable the children to see the moons of Jupiter, 
the rings of Saturn, the mountains on the moon, double 
stars, comets, sunspots, and so forth. 

' ' Now I '11 tell you why. It is simply because we have 
a great regard for the souls of children — not just their 
minds, but their souls. There is something in those 
souls larger and more beautiful than suns and planets. 
But you must appeal to these great things. The deep 
things must call to the deep. And when a boy or a girl 
gets the image of Saturn, for instance, floating there in 
black and frigid space, swept about by those enormous 
rings of fire miles across, he or she immediately hears a 
tone vibrate, — 'A trumpet blows within my soul,' as 
the old negro song says, — and an area, a great calm 
area in the interior of that individual, which corre- 
sponds with that infinite sky, comes into being, and 
will remain in being if the window is not too quickly 
shut on it again. 

"Now I want to know whether there is any parent 
who will deny the right and the privilege of his child to 
have this experience in a world where he is going to be 
deafened and battered by immediacy, by the impact of 
all the flying debris that goes with the cyclonic action 
of this thing we call 'modern life' ! How shall a man 
keep his bearings, and steer through the heavy seas 
breaking on sand-bars and reefs, except by some kind 
of 'range' like this, which shall give him a clue to the 
relativity of things and the unimportance of what is 
immediate in contrast with what is ultimate? 



114 SHACKLED YOUTH f 

*'It is an amazing thing, this danse macabre — 
while round about is this silent immensity, forever 
looking on at the insanity and sickness and puerility of 
our blind life. Every night it follows the earth's shadow 
in a progressive wave, falling horizontal, and as the 
light advances with dawn, you see that fuzz rising ver- 
tical, and then stirring about while the light lasts. 
Perfectly automatic, and just as the tide follows the 
moon, this life vibrates, systole, diastole, as the light 
goes and comes. But there has always been a modicum 
of people on the earth who were not automata, who 
looked off, who lay awake and thought; and these 
people began by looking at the stars. And did it ever 
occur to you that this looking at the stars, more than 
anything else, produced our spiritual life and its ex- 
pression in the most profound things in human thought 
and words? 

"And, having looked off the earth and realized that 
night unto night showeth knowledge, they get a sense 
of proportion in regard to affairs on the earth, and are 
far less likely to become moths around the candles of 
newspaper opinion, or political spell-binding, or any 
kind of lurid inflammation in a sick society. 

"Therefore we want to take this opportunity, and 
by the use of a little glass in a brass tube, bring what 
we call 'heavenly bodies' nearer to our earth, having 
this theory : that the more children associate with the 
big things of the universe, — big ideas, big spaces out 
of doors, the sea, the sky, big literature and big mu- 
sic, — the more the big and generous and beautiful 
qualities buried in every one of them will grow and 



ASTRONOMY 115 

overshadow the little weeds, whose seeds are sown so 
plentifully in our modern society, and whose persist- 
ent foliage fills so many uncultivated spaces with its 
barren show." 

They got the telescope and they used it. Astronomy 
became immediately a great feature in the life of that 
school. Everybody looked through the telescope — 
not just the astronomy class. And the little astronomy 
man talked at morning exercises, over and over again, 
to children breathless with that sense of space, of law 
and of order, of endless time and measureless distance 
and unimaginable velocity. 

One of the great defects of schools is this, that there 
is nothing large enough thought about there. The 
significance of things is missed. They fuss around a 
great deal with the little angles, without indicating the 
great arcs which those angles subtend. How far can 
these insectian activities project the soul on its lone 
way, unless they are interpreted by a master of the 
soul's music? 

So it always comes back to a person — a person who 
has three generous dimensions; whose length, whose 
breadth and whose height are equal; who, walking be- 
side these small Pilgrims, as the Interpreter, makes 
life more than meat and the body than raiment, and 
points out the peaks of those delectable mountains on 
the horizon, which neither he nor they can ever reach 
but which, nevertheless, they approach together in 
a companionship which is inspiring for both — and 
which constitutes the whole of education. 



IX 

RECREATION 

It would be a blessed relief to drop all talk of school 
for a while, — we will admit that, — and that is what 
we will do. After all, schools should not become obses- 
sions. If we had sense enough, we could get on very 
well without them. They are not essentials. Some- 
thing happened to make them seem so. It was a man 
with a book. He "put it over" the man who had no 
book. He made him believe that you could not be 
wise and happy unless you knew what was in his book. 
He persuaded the man with no book, but with plenty 
of brains and knowledge of his craft, to hire him to 
teach. He talked to him about religion and a great 
many things that were exceedingly interesting, and 
he finally got himself entrusted with the instruction of 
his children. And now the man who knows all about 
books, and is called a "professional" man, who gives 
his directions for doing things in a very autocratic way, 
is much more honored than the man who knows about 
materials and tools, who is a craftsman. Esau has 
sold his birthright to Jacob. 

But do not let us deceive ourselves for a single min- 
ute. The craftsman is likely to be the better man. The 
fact that fame remembers him with no familiar name 
must not deceive anybody. And the reason why he is 
likely to be a better man is, that he is closer to nature. 
He is sure to be a better man if he can do one thing, 
namely, interpret his work in terms of spirit; or, in 



RECREATION 117 

other words, have the right idea about himself, his 
life, and his creations. There he sometimes needs the 
man with the book, but not always. Now, when it 
comes to craftsmanship, as between the book-man and 
the hand-man, both of whom you say are craftsmen 
after all, listen to this statement of Stevenson's: "If 
any of us folk who write about things could attain to 
the dignity of those who do them, we would indeed be 
worth consideration." 

It 's the man who uses his whole battery of power, 
not just his head, who is the integral man, the man on 
his feet with the currents of the Earth's life charging 
him — not insulated, but a conductor. 

From a book by an Englishman named Tomlinson, 

— a most observant person with wonderful moods and 
a great gift for scooping up right words out of the sea 
of words (and there they flip and hiss like a great 
catch of silver shad in a seine), — I take this, because 
it bears on this question of craft and manhood : — 

"There is an old fellow I met in this village who will 
take the ruins of a forest, take pine-boles, metal cord- 
age and canvas, and without plans, but from the ideal 
in his eye, build you the kind of lithe and dainty 
schooner that, with the cadences of her sheer and 
moulding and the soaring of her masts, would keep 
you by her side all day in harbor; build you the kind 
of girded, braced and immaculate vessels, sound at 
every point, tuned and sweet to a precision that in a 
violin would make a musician flush with inspiration 

— a ship to ride, lissom and light, the uplifted Western 
ocean, and to resist the violence of vaulting seas and 



ii8 SHACKLED YOUTH 

the drive of hurricane. She will ride out of the storm 
afterwards, none to applaud her, over the mobile hills, 
traveling express, the rags of her sails triumphant pen- 
nants in the gale, the beaten seas pouring from her 
deck. 

**He, that modest old man, can create such a being 
as that, and I have heard visitors to this village, leis- 
ured and cultured folk, talk down to the old fellow who 
can think out a vessel like that after supper and go out 
after breakfast to direct the laying of her keel — talk 
down to him, kindly enough, of course, and smilingly, 
as a 'working-man.'" 

Recreation is largely an adult word. They — the 
grown-ups — need recreation, and in general need it 
very badly, because they have allowed the processes 
of civilization to tear down a great many fine things 
which they had given to them as children, among them 
the capacity for pure play. Some of this loss is inevit- 
able. When you once discover what degree of tragedy 
goes with human affairs, you cannot have that perfect 
abandon which you had at fourteen to twenty, and 
especially earlier. 

But a good deal has been lost through carelessness 
only. For it was assuredly careless to allow anybody 
to rob us in broad daylight of one of the most precious 
of our endowments — the capacity for play, for idle- 
ness, for vegetation. And yet these assiduous task- 
masters, shouting all kinds of catch-penny slogans, — 
from old Ben Franklin down, — have done it. They 
have got us so bewildered with the music in their band- 
wagon and the antics of their menagerie, that we actu- 



RECREATION 119 

ally don't know what to do with any time left over 
after they have taken their huge slice, but continue to 
follow the parade and indulge in their peanuts. Look 
at the boulevards, the theatres, the summer gardens, 
the automobiles, the motor-boats, the moving pic- 
tures, the victrolas, the Sunday newspapers, the popu- 
lar magazines. 

It would seem that one of the most essential of the 
lessons of life is this — what to do with leisure time 
so that it shall always be re-creative ; so that it shall 
always renew a right spirit within you. As a matter of 
fact, if our work was the work most suited to us, if we 
expressed ourselves very directly in our work and if 
we did not have too much of it, if we did not violate 
the dignity and the beauty of it by doing too much in 
order to secure larger rewards and a quicker recogni- 
tion, if it was not so much competitive work and was 
more cooperative and intensely friendly and exhila- 
rating, then recreation would only be a different kind 
of work. And that is what it is at its best; and yet 
there is a place for quiescence, for passivity, and a 
most important place. 

If you have had the good fortune to read Hudson's 
book, " Far Away and Long Ago," you may remember 
one chapter in which he tells how, at a certain time 
of his life down there in the great plains of the Argen- 
tine, he began to go off by himself, on a pony or afoot, 
into the vast loneliness of that land. He was a boy, as 
I remember it, about twelve years of age, and these 
experiences, surrounded by the silence and beauty of 
the land and sky, by the subtle influence of the things 



120 SHACKLED YOUTH 

that grew there and that moved mysteriously there 
through the grass and tall reeds, were very profound 
experiences, which eventually worked a kind of magic 
on him, by the force of which he became part of all he 
saw. Both the huge things and the little things took 
him into their confidence, and made him their familiar 
friend and close associate. Something took place 
within him which he calls by the name of ^'animism" 
— a certain polarity of the mind not only, but of the 
very blood-corpuscles, so that he felt himself initiated 
into a kind of society, — the society of the inarticu- 
late earth, — and changed in a peculiar manner, dif- 
ferentiated from his family and friends by a transfusion 
of blood, and thereafter immune from the fevers and 
obsessions of those who are confined to human society. 
You may say that Hudson was of a peculiar tem- 
perament, and that very few would react to environ- 
ment as he did. But the fact is that, at a certain age, 
perhaps adolescence, every child has this peculiar affin- 
ity, — this ability to become one with nature, — and 
very few indeed find the opportunity to indulge it. It 
takes time and it takes detachment, a certain soli- 
tariness, repeated expeditions alone; but once it has 
worked its beneficent charm, that person knows that 
he has established an intimacy with the most per- 
manent source of strength and happiness — his own 
Mother Nature, draped in those astonishing garments, 
the Earth, the Sea, the Sky. Thereafter, however sub- 
merged he may be in the pursuit of a livelihood and 
a career, he is perfectly aware that this intimacy is 
his meat and drink, and at every opportunity, when 



RECREATION 121 

he can escape, you will find him in remote places re- 
newing his youth, re-creating himself, recovering that 
deliberation and poise and serenity and robusticity 
and resourcefulness, that clarity of vision and inevit- 
ability of action that characterize his associates in the 
wilderness. 

Recreation that does not include this experience may 
still be called by that name, but does not extend to the 
roots of a man's or a woman's nature; and, unless as 
boy or girl this baptism has been administered, it never 
will. 

Therefore we advocate a sufficient amount of quiet 
detached life for children: not enough to induce anti- 
social traits, and produce peculiarities which they 
themselves will afterwards regret ; but certainly enough 
to enable them to see more and more clearly that their 
kinship extends to the whole universe of life, and that 
the part that cannot speak and reason is forever cor- 
recting the errors of the part that can, healing its dis- 
eases, forgiving its iniquities, satisfying its mouth with 
good things. 

There is that much to be said then for passivity, and 
much more could be said. When it comes to activities, 
the one most closely allied with the passivity men- 
tioned is that of the naturalist. So far as enjoying life 
is concerned, I contend that the naturalist has got the 
best of it on every count. And if that is really so, why 
should we not have some share in his happiness? In 
the chapter on natural history, a plan for securing these 
blessings of the naturalist, by those who are not to 
be professionals in that subject, has been discussed, 



122 SHACKLED YOUTH 

and also some emphasis put upon the fact that the 
place allowed for that subject in school curricula, and 
the people entrusted with it, are wholly inadequate. 
The only way most of us will ever catch the spell of 
this subject is by association with a person who is a 
naturalist, and who has the art of transmitting his 
enthusiasm as well as his gifts of observation. 

If children could spend a suitable part of their vaca- 
tions with such a person, you would have a type of 
recreation that could hardly be improved upon. I sup- 
pose that one of the most beneficial things that could 
possibly happen to city-bred or country-bred boys or 
girls would be to spend a summer with an Indian, and 
get some realization of the fact that their own life is 
one of blindness, deafness, and helplessness. That they 
depend almost entirely upon assistance from others, 
and can do little or nothing for themselves. That their 
resources, when tested by the forces of nature in unin- 
habited places, are exhausted in a few minutes, and 
their instincts always misleading and fatal. That it is 
quite as desirable to know how to take care of one's 
self under adverse physical conditions as it is to know 
banking or law ; and that the honors in this world be- 
long to the banker, the lawyer, and the business man, 
only because they keep closely within a very small 
area of human experience. 

The same might be said of other crafts than wood- 
craft. Take sailing for instance. "Captains Coura- 
geous" is a good book; so is "Two Years before the 
Mast"; so is "The Cruise of the Cachalot." In all of 
these a boy is shown being instructed in the ancient 



RECREATION 123 

and very honorable art of handling sailing vessels under 
all conditions. And whether he can become an artist 
in that department or not, the process of learning it is 
one of the most important things that can happen to 
him, for it involves several very fundamental experi- 
ences. First is his association with the sea, and with 
winds, tides, and weather in general. It is necessary 
to say that the motor-boat is a means whereby the 
whole significance of the experience is lost. A motor- 
boat for boys and girls is a complete evasion of the 
opportunity the sea offers for constructive recreation. 
But when you introduce a boy — and I include girls 
as equally interested and able — to a sail-boat, you 
do him a great service. First, because the elements, 
winds, and water, are exceedingly important things to 
get on some kind of terms with — to recognize their 
humors, their playfulness and their rage, and the 
premonitions of each. Second, because the tradition of 
the sail is an old and very fascinating one, and the more 
you know of it, the more the construction and the 
performance of ships get into your essential interests, 
the more likely you are to respect everything whose 
usefulness has made it beautiful — which grew in 
beauty as it grew in serviceability. 

The very breath of romance, the presence of the 
Northmen and the Iberian trader, down through the 
whole vivid story of hulls and canvas, spars and rig- 
ging, is in every little boat bobbing at its mooring, 
with the same salt sea tugging at it and the same old 
winds tapping its halyards against the mast. 

If it has a cabin and can be used for living, then the 



124 SHACKLED YOUTH 

sense of adventure is complete, even though the voy- 
ages are in land-locked bays. 

Once you begin to spend nights aboard, you get a 
better sense of the proportion that really exists be- 
tween the human and the un-human : how insignificant 
the former is, compared with the latter; and how de- 
pendent a man is upon some kind of shell into which 
he can creep out of the austerity and chill of the night 
sky, light his lamp and his stove, and finally sleep while 
the dark tides flow beneath him and his boat swings to 
her cable. 

We were anchored one night in a small harbor on 
the New England coast, and the two boys and I rowed 
over to a schooner anchored nearby. Hailed by a man 
aboard, they climbed over her side and went below at 
his invitation. What led up to the conversation in 
that cabin, I do not know; but when they came back 
after an hour or more, they breathlessly told me the 
things that he recounted to them, the things that made 
him the man he was — old in years and in knowledge 
of the sea and ships. 

I could imagine the scene in that cabin under the 
yellow lamp: two boys with bare feet sitting on the 
locker, and the old shell-back smoking and calmly 
reciting a little of his vast store of experiences as a 
Gloucesterman — on the Newfoundland banks ; off the 
coast of Greenland in Baffin Bay; of carrying sail in 
midwinter gales; of lying at anchor in mountainous 
seas and a week of blind fog ; of picking up lost dories 
and frozen men; of the run for home with the fleet, 
with no reefs in a forty-knot wind — until his son 



RECREATION 125 

died in the cabin on his last voyage, and the old man 
quit. 

Here was oral tradition in full blast. Here was the 
thing that puts more color and more flavor into the 
eyes and ears, the veins and arteries of boys, than 
years of school, and leaves permanent tracks on their 
souls, like the tracks of a prehistoric animal on an 
ancient shore. When you can get a man like this to 
talk to your boys or girls, — and that is something 
you can rarely arrange; it has to come by the Grace 
of God, — you have done more to adjust their com- 
passes and correct their chronometers than any single 
thing you can mention. 

It is clean, it is fine, it is adventurous and involves 
the endurance of bitter hardness, and it is unconscious 
of anything extraordinary: it is just a simple tale of 
a very simple life, unrecognized and soon extinguished. 
Some sense of values must register permanently as 
between this kind of man and the soft kind — the 
indoor man; and a certain relish for those asperities 
that make small comforts peculiarly grateful and 
always suflicient, without desire for those gross and 
upholstered accessories with which the successful man 
seems determined to suffocate himself and his family. 

And then! *'Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twi- 
light?" — having come down the little stream, through 
the great expanse of northern wilds, with his canoe, 
as one of the parti-colored autumn leaves floating with 
him ; with his trout-rod and his camera, his duflle-bag 
and kit and little silk tent. That evening he camps — 
he and his boy or girl, perhaps — under a group of 



126 SHACKLED YOUTH 

golden poplars that make a sanctuary, a hymn, and a 
benediction. 

The chipmunk flashes across the boulder, the chick- 
adee calls with his three exquisite notes, the great 
woodpecker hammers, the loon laughs from a lake, 
''dark brown flows the river, golden is the sand." 

You take your children into such partnership, on 
journeys of this sort, as circumstances will allow. You 
will not have the same sort of experience that you 
have alone or with a man or two ; but you will be ful- 
filling some of your obligations as a father, and will 
be making school less necessary ; and the less necessary 
you can make school, the better. 

But of all recreation for children, if the word is appli- 
cable at all to such newly created beings, the farm is 
the best, because the farm is the most real, and per- 
haps also the most practicable. The greatest good 
fortune that I can wish for any family is to have the 
kind of grandfather our family had. 

He lived on a farm in the lovely country of Mary- 
land near the Susquehanna River, which gleamed in 
the distance with its bright lure, as it flowed through 
the hills. Every year we escaped for a month — only 
a month — from the dusty and warm confinement of 
a New York suburb, and by a breathless progress on 
trains through fields of wheat and corn, butterflies and 
singing grasshoppers, through hot and ugly towns, 
across shining rivers, we arrived at Paradise — at the 
delectable land of cows, pigs, calves, chickens, horses, 
oxen, mules, negroes, brooks, spring-houses, apple 
orchards — all in a setting of woods and meadows, 



RECREATION 127 

filled with the odors of mint and the notes of the 
meadow larks. It was an enchanted land. To arrive 
was to fulfill every extravagant desire. To leave was 
to enter the Valley of the Shadow of commonplace 
routine. 

While there, we breathed the very wholesomest air, 
mental, physical, spiritual. To awake in the morning 
and, instead of the strident cries of the ** Micks," as 
we called them, the drone of the hand-organ and the 
jingle and rattle of the horse-car, to hear the farm 
sounds, the far-away calls to horses, the long complaint 
of calves, the mixed staccato of chickens, ducks, and 
turkeys, the songs of birds, the mourning dove — to 
awake in the morning was a daily re-creation. 

Breakfast in the old low-ceilinged dining-room, 
prayers in the cool sitting-room, with the old man 
reading, ''Lord Thou hast been our dwelling place in 
all generations"; and then the long, delicious day 
among all the farm activities, until the scented velvet- 
blue night was framed in our bedroom windows. If 
you have n't a grandfather with a farm, can you pos- 
sibly adopt one who will let you interfere with all his 
employments, who will be as happy to see you each 
year as you are to see him and his house? No, you can- 
not. A grandfather like this cannot be manufactured 
out of nothing. He must always be a part of destiny, 
a gift out of the millions of years of earth's experience, 
an incomparable gift to children. What shall we do 
for lack of these grandfathers; Lord, to whom shall 
we go? 

So much for the out-of-door things. Of course, it is 



128 SHACKLED YOUTH 

barely touching on the subject; but there is no room 
in this chapter to go beyond the area of suggestion. 

When you come to indoor recreations, there is a 
most alluring range of choice, toward which children 
should be definitely moving; so that, combining out- 
door things with indoor, they may eventually come into 
the inheritance of the man or woman who needs not 
seek good fortune, because he continually possesses it. 

There is music, concerning which something has been 
said elsewhere in this book; and there are books. And 
now you add to music and to books some of these extra- 
ordinary experiences with your hands, — some work- 
ing in wood, in clay, in iron, with a proper place to 
work in, a place apart, — and another breach is made 
in the wall of circumstance through which you escape 
into the enchanted land. 

You know, in spite of all romantic argument, the 
soul is quite unmixable, and its health seems to depend 
on considerable periods of uninterrupted detachment 
from all human society. 

Then, if it has some of the characteristics of a planet, 
and not exclusively those of a toy balloon, it begins 
quietly to turn on its axis and to take on some of the 
deep and strange colors of its immortality, as it floats 
in infinite space on an orbit which, one day, will return 
it no more, to be blown about by gusts of passion and 
of doubt as it tugs at its thread. 

Under the title *' recreation,'* as applied to schools, 
one would naturally think that athletics was to be the 
subject discussed. 

But this is not a conventional chapter; and the recre- 



RECREATION 129 

ations I mention are recreations that reach down into 
the recesses of human life, and are as necessary for 
the teachers as for the children. 

School and college athletics are good-enough things, 
but have no value comparable with these recreative 
things I have mentioned. Nevertheless, they have 
their place as part of the training of Youth for what- 
ever race is set before it. The American and English 
people, with their sense of "the game," get a relish 
out of life that is obtained by the gameless nations at 
a cost of cleanness and health which is evident. 

The game is a great feature in morale and, to a 
certain extent, in ethics. But the tendency to sur- 
render too much to group-loyalty, and to idolize vic- 
tory and aggressiveness generally, is always present 
and often overshadowing. The defects of the strong 
Rooseveltian type become sufficiently apparent, along 
with its virtues. People "determined to win" are 
hardly more wholesome than people unable to win, 
because in winning they usually lose more than they 
gain, both for themselves and for their contempo- 
raries. They lose their souls, their critical judgment, 
their open mind, their generous hearty and they make 
it seem that you can afford to lose these things if you 
win by doing so. A game that involves a real anti- 
pathy for an opponent is not a good game. It is the 
forerunner of the business game, and the business 
game easily becomes the war game — the game of 
those who sit in the seat of the scornful, who stand in 
the way of sinners, who walk in the counsel of the 
ungodly- 



CROSS-FERTILIZATION 

Everybody knows why the milkweed floats its seeds 
off on the wind; why the cockle-burr hooks its seeds 
into passing animals ; and why other plants find other 
means of transportation for their children, on vehicles 
that never return them to their old homes. 

Like the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they 
go out to increase and multiply and possess the earth ; 
and they can do this successfully only in a new soil. 

It is a good thing to move away. It is a bad thing 
to cluster around the parental stock and, filled with 
lovely sentiment and sweet fatuity, become soft and 
spongy, or cynical and selfish, or both. 

You can disguise this congested life under various 
costumes. *' Manner" is the most effective, a certain 
grace, a certain dignity, a certain loyalty. But it 
gradually becomes sterile. 

As children grow up, they must leave the place or 
take the consequences. That soil is exhausted for 
them. If they don't leave it physically, they at least 
must leave it spiritually. If the tradition is a good 
one and a hardy and wholesome one, they should cer- 
tainly not leave that; but that is not a matter of 
choice. That tradition will determine their form, wher- 
ever they may be. The new plant may be a vigorous 
or a sickly one, but its morphology is fixed within 
certain rather narrow limits. 

That is one botanical parable that can easily defend 



CROSS-FERTILIZATION 131 

itself against successful denial. The human plant that 
grows up in exhausted soil is especially subject to 
blight, to fungus, to caterpillars of various kinds. The 
early frosts of work, of marriage conditions, of civic 
responsibilities, wither it, and it can be preserved only 
by the artificial protection produced by its parents 
and their colony. 

Then there is another botanical parable not quite 
so obvious: cross-fertilization is as essential as trans- 
portation. 

Bees from other trees, from remote trees, buzz 
around yours, and the pollen of a different origin and 
a different habit gets transferred to the stigma — the 
sticky, open-armed, attentive, eager stigma. New 
ideas get carried to fresh minds ; inbreeding from your 
ideas is avoided, and you have a new thing and per- 
haps a very beautiful thing, at any rate a vital thing, 
growing on your tree. 

This requires the open house — not open to the 
merely predatory insects of the human species, to the 
class-conscious or race-conscious ants and bugs, who 
lose their individuality in black swarms, and substitute 
a group conscience for their own. The ant does not 
seem to be a proper symbol for a healthy human 
society. Germany tried the army-ant idea, and the 
regimental swarms have been walked on by a different 
kind of creature and crushed into an ugly pulp, from 
which, it is hoped, something not so ant-like will arise 
in due time. 

And it was a lack of cross-fertilization, by the way, 
that produced the Hohenzollem and Prussian mind. 



132 SHACKLED YOUTH 

It kept fertilizing itself with its own poisonous secre- 
tions, and became extremely unhealthy for itself and 
for the world. 

If you were able to examine the interiors of typical 
American family life in the three general strata, — 
upper, middle, and lower, — you would find them 
closed by choice or by circumstance to the ingress of 
bees as well as ants, and looking upon the intrusion of 
pollen-carriers as entirely unnecessary and unpleasant, 
if not actually harmful. As a matter of fact, the adults 
have usually experienced that change of life which pre- 
cludes any further fertilization. Not so the children. 

The upper-class family, arrived and established fin- 
ally in its social group, has the disadvantage for child- 
ren that it is insulated from actual life by various 
layers of things procurable for money. They live under 
a bell-glass, and grow up very lovely creatures and 
exceedingly good to look at, but in general so sensitive 
to the blustery weather outside their harbor that they 
only glance out with a shudder, after they have passed 
a certain age. Before that age they are herded along 
through the approved runways that lead to college 
and business. Among the blossoms a pollen-carrier, a 
dusty individual from another level, full of adventures 
and energies and dreams, does sometimes go blunder- 
ing about for a while, like Parsifal in Klingsor's gar- 
den. But, on the whole, these families reproduce them- 
selves with great care — and dwindle away to some 
kind of thin apparition ; finally falling into the melting- 
pot, to which they contribute nothing that can be 
ascertained by any kind of analysis. 



CROSS-FERTILIZATION 133 

They themselves in their youth are charming, and 
sometimes in their age, full of delightful gay e ties, ex- 
quisite in face and figure and costume, if girls, and 
very frank and eager and well groomed, if boys ; trained 
in all the courtesies and amenities. And both are sus- 
ceptible to a cross-fertilization which would vitalize 
these otherwise barren virtues and disseminate them 
to the advantage of any community. 

But no! The boys call on the girls of their partic- 
ular guild, whose idiom is precisely theirs, propose — 
are accepted — join the company in the parlor — are 
among those present on the distinctive occasions — 
belong to the clubs they should belong to — are in 
the boxes at the opera; and thus, among their own 
children, stagnate decorously. 

They are, like the rest of us, caught in a net. I am 
far from advocating their extermination. All I ask is 
that they avoid their inevitable self -extermination by 
keeping a more open house, and a more open mind, 
and a more responsive heart, and a keener intuition, 
and a livelier generosity. Let them live open to the 
winds of heaven, and share something more of the 
common lot, and overcome thereby those trepidations 
and shrinkings and pitiful ignorances by which they 
are deformed and so go limping and grimacing to the 
mercies of the funeral director. 

The middle-class are no better, of course. No 
** classes" are any better — but are more much likely 
to be worse, though in a different way. 

The middle-class family is engaged in social climb- 
ing, or some kind of stolid and deadly respectability, 



134 SHACKLED YOUTH 

venerating established customs, full of pharisaism and 
infamous platitudes. And yet, withal, sturdy, de- 
pendable, operating with determination and integrity 
the part of the machinery of economics that is en- 
trusted to it. 

And the lower-class family is too tired to care much 
about anything except physical comfort and diversion. 

In both these classes, — in all three, — splendid 
stuff; sometimes among the parents, always among 
the boys and girls. 

How can they share their respective virtues and 
eliminate their defects? How can they begin to ap- 
proach some kind of reciprocity? The barriers of caste 
are not real barriers to youth. Why do our callers 
and the guests at our table have to be from our own 
group — the same people we saw yesterday in their 
houses? Why must we continue to exchange the same 
currency in the sanie amounts, and never grow richer 
in experience? 

Why, for instance, can't the locomotive engineer, 
or the steamship captain, or the boss smelter, or the 
trained nurse, or the motor-man, or the foreman of 
the machine-shop, or any intelligent human being 
doing intelligent and responsible work in the world, 
be the familiar of the banker and the doctor and the 
manufacturer and the educator? 

If there could be a frank and friendly interchange 
and a sense of comradeship between such people, con- 
sider the advantage to the children on both sides. 

Your old friend, Jerry Jackson, who takes the Lim- 
ited from Chicago to Elkhart three times a week, 



CROSS-FERTILIZATION 135 

comes to dinner on Sunday instead of the distinguished 
lawyer who lives in the next block. Jerry talks about 
his trade. Look at those boys of yours. They see a 
man whose finger-nails are not clean, — a rather hairy 
and rough and plain-spoken and clumsy sort of per- 
son at a table, — but whose eye and brain and nerve 
have stood tests that exhilarate them to a painful 
attention. They are all stigmatic, and here is a bee 
loaded with pollen; and that day is epochal. 

But no locomotive engineer ever comes — or any 
other pollen-carrier — to these sticky blossoms of 
yours. The people come who came before; and all the 
boys and girls can do is to be prodded into some show 
of politeness and allowed to escape from the baneful 
presences into their own affairs as soon as possible. 

And, contrariwise, why should you not be a wel- 
come guest in the house of the motor-man, or the 
carpenter, and tell his boys and girls about the Col- 
orado Canon, or Siberia, or stories you had read in 
books; bring along a book or two, perhaps — ''The 
Wind in the Willows," "The Adventures of Pinoccio " ; 
discuss the labor situation with the old man and be, 
in a word, a stimulating and informal friend of the 
family? 

It seems a piece of idealism beyond the reach of any 
Utopia. For one thing, there is not a sufficiently even 
exchange, in the mind of the more sophisticated party 
to the thing. Even if the mechanic is just as intelligent 
as the superintendent, as regards the things that make 
for social intercourse, their minds pass each other on 
different levels and do not seem to meet. 



136 SHACKLED YOUTH 

It ought not to be so, for the things they have in 
common are far more numerous and important than 
the things that divide them. 

Moreover, the man higher up has too many reser- 
vations due to the fact that he is higher up, even if 
he is higher up because he has a right to be, and in 
spite of the fact that nobody is really higher up or 
lower down except by some perfectly artificial stand- 
ard, provided nobody has wrapped his single talent 
in a napkin and gone and buried it. 

But if the parents do not cross the barriers, the child- 
ren are condemned to a real sterility, which expresses 
itself later in those fatal prejudices and injustices with 
which the channels of human intercourse are mined. 

One explosion follows another, and gradually cer- 
tain kinds of misunderstandings are blasted away into 
dust, and remain as derelicts no longer, to impede 
navigation. 

This has to take the place of cross-fertilization, 
namely, a process of attrition ; but the individual who 
can escape this wasteful way is fortunate and also 
highly useful. There was Jacob Riis, for instance; there 
are now Jane Addams and Thomas Mott Osborne 
and Dr. Steiner, and others more or less like them. 

Compare the richness of this kind of life with the 
life of the person — even the distinguished person — 
who is confined to his group. And then consider the 
value of the service. 

And after you have done that, decide whether you 
propose to make your children class-children or not; 
whether your guests will always be ''like us " ; whether 



CROSS-FERTILIZATION 137 

it is not wholly a misfortune that your son is elected 
to the exclusive club, in college or out. 

If your children are capable of nothing else, it is 
because you have made them sterile by that insidious 
screening which intercepts the bees. The private 
school has helped you, the preparatory school has 
helped you, and the endowed college has helped you. 

You are not to blame, because it must needs be that 
such offenses come — and yet you will pay the penalty. 

The crust of society, composed of the people who 
have, surrounds the molten interior composed of those 
who have not; and it is a thin crust. Folks dancing 
on it, d la Marie Antoinette and her friends, may 
break it through; and that lurid lava comes pouring 
over all the dainty trappings and customs, and things 
begin over again, as it were. 

Certainly we are helpless neuters if we cannot be 
fertilized by the events of the last few years into some 
sense of comradeship with the men and women and 
children at the bottom of the pot. 

And yet, such is the poisonous infection from the 
tsetse fly of money and property and position and the 
divine rights involved in all these things, that men and 
women are still interested in some kind of cheap pal- 
liatives, thereby exposing the shrunken souls within 
them. 

You don't have to read Mr. Veblin's books, to rec- 
ognize the fact that most people who are above the line 
of submergence in this life are engaged in building a 
scaffolding for something or other which is not discov- 
ered except by some accident or by death. 



138 SHACKLED YOUTH 

They are building an enclosure of prejudice, of pre- 
tension, of time-serving and timidity, — all of which 
constitute what the bridge-builders call "false work," 
— in order to support something which they feel is 
worth supporting, but which they never voluntarily 
disclose. 

Standing on high ladders, with their pockets bulg- 
ing with the spikes of family interests, business inter- 
ests, political interests, they hammer away year after 
year more or less feverishly, and put up all manner 
of sway-bracing and cross-bracing. Sometimes the 
whole crazy business falls down, and the hammerer 
looks the horror he feels, if he survives at all. But 
mostly it is taken down decorously enough by his 
executors, and you have a chance to see what this 
structure surrounded. You have to go rather close, to 
see it at all; and when you are close enough, what 
you frequently see is a sort of small trap, amazingly 
small. 

If you had been able to get close enough during the 
life of the occupant, you would have found inside that 
trap the soul of the man, with that expression of the 
rodent in its face — the expression of hunger and of 
fear. 



THE END 



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